JULY 13, 2022

Hello, everyone!

As anti-abortion and pro-choice advocacy continues, Asian adoptee activists are getting stuck in the middle as they face harassment. Some question if they’re even “grateful” to be alive.

Adoptees supporting Roe v. Wade, like Chinese American Annie Wu, keep getting asked invasive hypotheticals like “What if you were never born?” To that, she says, “If my birth mother aborted me, that would be FINE with me. I would not exist, so I would not care or be impacted.”

Many adoptee activists are situated in a position of alternatives. Adoption is often the manipulative “moral alternative” for biological parents who cannot support their children. However, because of their experiences, many adoptees are reclaiming their narratives. For them, addressing this issue means including their perspectives because children should have similar considerations for their wellbeing after birth, not just before birth.

Privatized adoption of Asian children has been an avenue for many families to create families, but many adoptees continue to express that their experiences are not always a fairy-tale happy ending. Instead of viewing children as “commodities,” many activists call for more consideration into the foster care system, adoption industries and the overall lack of control for adoptees in their childhoods. All children deserve a loving family.

Race in America 🌎

In south Seattle, a 48-year-old man was arrested on hate crime charges after threatening to kill Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA 7th District).

Rep. Jayapal, the first Indian American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2016, called 911 on Saturday after a man with a .40 caliber gun was standing outside her house in the street and using obscenities. After police arrested the man, he told authorities that he knew Rep. Jayapal lived there and wanted to set up a tent on their property.

Neighbors also confirmed seeing the man by Jayapal’s residence on numerous occasions yelling profanities and statements like: “Go back to India, I’m going to kill you.”

In Other Asian News 🗞

The Indian government is fining Amnesty International $8 million for probing the administration's finances.

In 2020, Amnesty India’s bank accounts were frozen as India’s Enforcement Directorate investigated the NGO’s financial proceedings. The Directorate, responsible for investigating financial crimes, reported that Amnesty’s Indian branch broke foreign financing laws by using overseas finances to fund local activities.

Amnesty India said these statements were “patently untrue” and criticized the government for authorizing press releases before serving a legal notice to the branch and its former executive director. India’s tendency to silence critics of its administration is a recurring pattern, reminiscent of previous NGOs and their legal cases, such as the recent lawsuit against Twitter for supposedly violating constitutional rights. 

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After a bill passed the lower house in March in Thailand, its government is coming to terms with the possible reality of choosing voluntary chemical castration as part of its solution to address gender-based violence and to serve as a sentence reduction for sex offenders in the nation.

Should the Thai government embrace the bill, the country would be joining Poland, South Korea, Russia, Estonia and some U.S. states in using castration to dissuade sexual assault.

While many in the government believe this is an effective method, there are critics of the bill. An NGO that addresses sexual violence and other sex crimes called the Women and Men Progressive Movement Foundation, led by director Jaded Chouwilai, advocates for rehabilitation, not castration. Chouwilai emphasizes that castration is a punishment of finality that indicates the system has given up and cannot rehabilitate offenders.



Art and Music 🎶

All nine members of the K-pop girl group TWICE have renewed their contract with their label JYP Entertainment.

The renewal means TWICE will be one of the girl groups that breaks the notorious 7-year run for many K-pop groups. It’s unclear how long the contract will last but this aligns with JYP Entertainment’s announcement in March for massive U.S. expansion efforts through a new subsidiary, JYP USA.

Following the contract renewal news, TWICE also teased out their eleventh mini album, “Between1&2,” which is slated for release on Aug. 26 with pre-orders starting exactly one month prior to that. TWICE has had a momentous year with member Nayeon becoming the first to release a solo album, to the group selling out and headlining their first stadium tour in the U.S.  

In a profile by The New York Times, deaf artist Christine Sun Kim is amplifying her story as an artist and creator with exhibits such as “Time Still Owes Me” at the Queens Museum in New York and at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, with American Sign Language (ASL) text sprawled over their walls.

Kim has lived in Berlin for over a decade but grew up in California after her parents emigrated from South Korea. She almost didn’t become an artist, nearly going into education while trying to figure out her future.

“Deaf people are always teachers by default,” she said, recalling that time. “We have to teach hearing people ASL, Deaf culture, whatever. So I think that inside, I had given up on being an artist, too. It took me a while to admit that I wanted to work with sound — maybe a few years, actually — because I was scared. I thought that working with sound was something that was so oppressive, and ingrained or dominant in our society."



What else is on our minds? 🧠
 

• Fattier skipjack tuna or katsuo from Japan are causing some to worry about the effects of climate change on the fish, known for being popular in sushi and other Japanese dishes. 

• From Japanese fish to technological ones, a team of scientists from Sichuan University in China have developed robot fish that can eat up microplastics. 

• The city of Jiufen in Taiwan is the enchanting place that inspired the beloved Hayao Miyazaki film, “Spirited Away.” This travel piece showcases its mountainous appeal. 

• American Chinese food takes many different forms depending on the region of the country. Take for instance, bread rolls served in Massachusetts Chinese restaurants alongside dishes with lobster sauce and chow mein sandwiches.  

• New cosmic images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful one to date, has NASA saying it is “the dawn of a new era in astronomy.”