"Model minority motherfucker" and "Hella rage"

My friend and fellow sociology geek Pookie shared this on Facebook today.


David Mayeda is a senior lecturer of sociology at the University of Auckland. He was my lecturer for the introductory sociology course earlier this year, and really made me enjoy the subject more than I expected to.

The academia of social sciences consists of too many white people, that it was certainly an honour to have David - one of the academics of colour in the university's social science disciplines - as a lecturer. He definitely brought an intersectional perspective on many broad sociological concepts that other lecturers may not have quite picked up on.

I quite enjoyed these two short pieces of spoken word poetry by David because I, too, feel that as an Asian living in a colonised country, it seems disingenuous for me to speak out against a system that is seen to benefit me. A system that elevates me above other groups of POC. That system is called white supremacy.

David doesn't have time for that. Neither do I.

A house made of sticks: the white romanticisation of the immigrant POC's struggle

Image credit: Official website of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I finally got my hands on a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's third novel Americanah, which was well-received by critics and the wider audience. I see Americanah as a novel about love, identity and diaspora. I intend to write a more comprehensive post about it later on when I finish it, but right now I just want to talk about a part of the novel that resonated with me.

Badass WOC of the Week: Shonda Rhimes

Image credit: British Airways

“I want [my daughter] to grow up feeling like there are no things she can’t do simply because she’s a woman of color. If I can do that, I’ve succeeded as a mother.”

In March 2005, a medical drama with an ensemble cast premiered as a midseason replacement on the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Grey's Anatomy - the title a clear play on the renowned human anatomy text book Gray's Anatomy - boasted a cast of ridiculously attractive people playing surgeons, snappy and trendy dialogue, and montages set to music with angsty piano-playing. 

By the end of its ten-episode run, Grey's became a household name, and at the centre of it all was its showrunner, Shonda Rhimes.

3 Things I Love About The Practice

Since the summer holidays started, I started watching David E. Kelley’s The Practice on a whim - or maybe it was just a way to sustain my obsession with Jessica Capshaw, who got her big primetime break playing young lawyer Jamie Stringer on the show.

The cast of The Practice

Image credit: ABC

The Practice is a highly acclaimed drama about a small law firm in Boston that mainly deals with criminal defence cases. It ran for eight seasons between 1997-2004, and although the last season acted as an introduction to its more lighthearted spin-off, Boston Legal, it never ceased to continue its exploration of the inner conflicts that come with the legal profession.

I used to be an avid watcher of Suits - before the huge drama about firm management and politics happened - and I’m a great fan of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing and The Newsroom. All three shows show an idealistic - and in Suits’s case, somewhat glamorous - account of the respective professional environments that they portray.

However, The Practice is just quite the opposite. I haven’t watched all the episodes yet, and I don’t plan to, but I have not encountered an episode that I didn’t find relevant or enlightening just yet. In three broad points, these are the three things I love about The Practice.

Campbell Live and feeling New Zealand solidarity in spite of Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome

Over the last couple of weeks, John Campbell and his team on Campbell Live have rallied the masses to raise money for the survivors of Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the central Philippines just over two weeks ago. The show’s fundraising drive was hugely successful, thanks to Campbell’s far-reaching influence and the generosity of New Zealanders.

At the beginning of his fundraising drive, Campbell anchored his show in front of St Patrick’s Cathedral where the Filipino community all over Auckland gathered to offer a special mass for the victims of Typhoon Haiyan. He managed to procure an interview (from about 10:41 onwards) with a couple who were in Cebu City when the typhoon struck. At the end of the interview, he rein that they’ve been living here for over 20 years, and so, are “very much New Zealanders”. It was an interesting thing for him to say.

Badass WOC of the Week: Karen Davila

In what seems to be a deviation from the Western perspective of the status of women in developing countries, there was an abundance of female broadcast journalists on Philippine television when I was growing up. 

Women occupied a wide range of positions on television news, from field reporters to news bulletin readers, to even anchors of their own current affairs shows. These women weren't just sent to do "soft news" stories, but many of them reported on site during events such natural calamities, rebellions and even war.

Image credit: ABS-CBN

As a child in a country where female journalists were household names not just for their good looks, but for their journalistic skills, my first responses to "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was a given. I wanted to be a broadcast journalist, and I wanted to be as good as the women I always saw on television: Loren Legarda, Korina Sanchez, Ces Drilon, and my favourite from around the age of 7 or 8, Karen Davila.

Typhoon Haiyan is not just an environmental issue

The Philippines is the largest country in the world that has the greatest exposure to tropical cyclones. I grew up in Parañaque, a city in the southern Metro Manila region, and I can remember days from July to October when classes would be suspended because a typhoon had arrived. This was because the streets flooded, and on occasion, structures would fall and block the roads.

Not having to go to school for two, sometimes three, days was fun for years. That was until September 2006, when Typhoon Xangsane struck Manila. We had no power for three days, but some areas - even those in more affluent neighbourhoods than ours - had no electricity for up to a week. We couldn’t travel anywhere because billboards had fallen on the motorways. Xangsane killed around 200 people.

I was 12 years old then, and yeah, in the back of my head, I knew that people died in typhoons. However, this was the first time that I saw something sinister in them.

Xangsane’s destructive winds wreaked havoc on Roxas Boulevard’s Manila Bay waterfront.

Image credit: acermate433s, Flickr

Little did I know that Xangsane wasn’t going to be the last, or the worst, of the batterings the Philippines would receive over the next seven years.