The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) will honor Parkin Lee of The Rockefeller Group, Yale Law professor Jean Koh Peters, and Fareed Zakaria, CNN host and Time editor-at-large with the 2012 Justice in Action Awards, at its Annual Lunar New Year Gala on Wednesday, February 8, 2011 at PIER SIXTY, Chelsea Piers, in New York City.

2012 Justice in Action Award Honorees Fareed Zakaria, Jean Koh Peters and Parkin Lee

The co-emcees for the evening are Juju Chang, Emmy Award-winning correspondent for ABC News Nightline, and Sree Sreenivasan, Dean of Student Affairs and digital media professor at Columbia Journalism School.

Juju Chang, Emmy Award-winning correspondent for ABC News Nightline, and Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs and digital media professor at Columbia School of Journalism will co-emcee. Photo by Lia Chang

The AALDEF Justice in Action Awards recognize exceptional individuals for their outstanding achievements and contributions in advancing justice and equality. Past recipients include the late civil rights icons Fred Korematsu and Gordon Hirabayashi, David Henry Hwang, Harold Koh, Mira Nair, Deval Patrick, Salman Rushdie,...

January 17, 2012

by  Suzanne Joe Kai

1998 isn't really that long ago, but for the Internet, it feels more like a century. 

Back then, when a 14 year old kid created AsianConnections.com, an online magazine in search of his Asian American identity, we jumped on board.  As mainstream journalists from TV, radio and print, we had been fretting for the zillionth time about the poor and stereotypical coverage of Asian Americans in the media, any American media. (A problem, by the way, that persists even today.) 

Scouting for stories, we rejoiced in the fact that Jerry Yang had co-founded Yahoo!, then the biggest star in the constellation of online ventures. 

Today, it was announced that Jerry Yang has left Yahoo! What a ride that was for Jerry. Born on February 6, 1966, Jerry Yang has a lifetime ahead of him and we wish him well and hope he continues to innovate.

Digging into our archives here is a commentary by contributing writer Tom Chin, and a photo of Jerry and his Yahoo! co-founder David Filo. We will go back into our archives again and also post Jerry's exclusive interview with AsianConnections.com.

By the way, in honor of the upcoming Year of the Dragon, there is a new beginning - the site is soon to finish a brand new back end system. There will be a lot more images and videos. Our site used to be hosted on the servers of movie review site RottenTomatoes.com thanks to its founders, while I helped the start-up as one of their first national ad directors and video producers.

We will now add back the hundreds and hundreds of exclusive features and interviews we've done over the years including U.S. Astronaut Leroy Chiao who blogged to AsianConnections' columnist Lia Chang from his space station. And the first known U.S.-Asia web simulcast we produced for Warner Bros. with Jet Li, upon his arrival to Hollywood. AsianConnections led the web simulcast engaging...

If you know Rain, BoA (shown left), and Sistar, then you already know K-Pop, Korea’s contemporary pop music and its artists.

K-Pop music is one of the fastest growing music genres in the world, and along with Korea’s popular TV drama serials, films and comic books are a growing source of export revenue for Korea.  

The growing global fan base of Korea's entertainment and cultural offerings, known as "Hallyu" or the "Korean Wave" feels more like a tidal wave in some countries. In France, for example, fans mostly in their youth sold out a concert in Paris reportedly in fifteen minutes. Several hundred fans who missed out on tickets held a rally and danced to K-Pop music in front of the Louvre Museum campaigning for a second concert. They got their wish for a second concert which also sold out in minutes. A flash mob as witnessed by this YouTube video shows hundreds of fans from all ethnicities crowding the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris last June, 2011 to welcome their favorite K-Pop artists. (image right)

On December 31, 2011 Korea's Culture, Sports and Tourism Minister Choe Kwang-shik announced a 2012 policy to expand support of Hallyu, to help keep the wave of Korean pop culture surging across its borders. The Korean government also hopes to attract more Hallyu fans into the areas of food, tourism, fashion and other cultural and entertainment offerings.

Leaders from Hollywood and S. Korea’s entertainment industry and academia convened in November for a summit at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles to explore the impact and future of Korea’s pop culture and entertainment, encompassing its music, films, television drama serials, and comic books.

The two-day summit Korean Wave Initiative – Hallyu: Riding the Korean Culture Wave for a Globalized World was held to explore the exciting developments of this trend and to discuss ways for Korea...

SAN FRANCISCO - The Fred T. Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights and Education, along with the members of the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice (Advancing Justice) - Asian Law Caucus, Asian American Justice Center, Asian American Institute and Asian Pacific American Legal Center - mourn the loss of civil rights leader Gordon Hirabayashi, who passed away on January 2, 2012 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada at the age of 93. His former wife, Esther Hirabayashi, passed away in Edmonton just hours later on the same day. She was 87.   He is survived by his wife, Susan, his children, Marion, Sharon, and Jay, his brother, James, and his sister Esther (also known as Tosh Furugori). "He was a great father who taught me about the values of honesty, integrity and justice," says his son, Jay Hirabayashi. "He was rightly recognized as a hero, but he never saw himself that way. He saw himself as someone who did wh
at he had to do to stand up for the rights he believed in."    In 1942, Hirabayashi was a 24-year-old student at the University of Washington when President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, ordering the incarceration of 120,000 innocent people of Japanese ancestry. Hirabayashi, an American citizen, turned himself into the FBI in order to intentionally defy a curfew law imposed on all west coast residents of Japanese ancestry. After he was arrested and convicted, Hirabayashi appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Similar toKorematsu v. United States (1944), and Yasui v. United States (1943), the Supreme Court sadly ruled in Hirabayashi v United States (1943) that the curfew law was justified due to military necessity. Hirabayashi was sent to a prison camp in Arizona.     In 1983 and 1987, after the discovery of new evidence proving the government had known there was no grounds for the mass incarceration, both Korematsu and Hirabayashi...

Five Secrets to a Happy, Healthy & Successful Life  By Marilyn Tam

You make well-meaning resolutions to improve your life. But your resolutions fade under the stress of multiple demands on your time and attention. Oftentimes the resolutions are history before the month is done. How can we ensure that we actually benefit from the good intentions that we made with such conviction?

Many years ago I made an earnest resolution to work less and to spend more time on my personal life, family and health.

Being a type A personality, it was easier to say that than to follow through. By late in the same month, as I am running through another airport, I realized that I am already back to my old pattern of working seven days a week.

On the next plane ride I took the time to ask myself a few hard questions. From that experience I developed these Five Guidelines to have a Happier, Healthier and more Successful Life. Isn't that what we are ultimately after?

1. Make resolutions that you can manage. Specify your desired end result and make the goals measureable. For example, instead of saying that you want to lose weight, give yourself a specific time frame for a number of pounds or inches broken down into smaller pieces so that you have incremental targets to meet. Make the objectives a slight stretch but achievable. You are more likely to continue once you see positive progress towards your ultimate goal.

Limit the number of resolutions. Your mind can only deal with so many tasks at a time. Limit your resolutions to fewer than seven and prioritize them. That way you can work on them in order of importance to maximize your success potential.

2. Review your life mission before you make your resolutions. What are the most important things in your life? When you make your commitments based on what you truly value, instead of what someone else or society tells you that you ought to do, you will be more...