The $4 billion lawsuit filed by Lucie Kim against Miley Cyrus for the infamous photo of her and various Disney stars slanting their eyes to imitate Asians has been dismissed. The lawsuit was class-action, and claimed that Miley violated a statute that doesn’t allow businesses to discriminate against minorities. Though the photo was in poor taste, it was deemed that the photo had not broken any laws.
The dismissal is fair: it’s grasping at straws to claim the photo was illegal. The Internet is rife with worse fodder and singling out …

We think of courage primarily in terms of battlefields, not a green light on a scoreboard. Yet that very light, registered by Republican Joseph Cao on the House scoreboard on Saturday, is symbolic of the courage of a man taking risks to benefit others.
Cao, a New Orleans native, is creating a political sensation not only because he is the first Vietnamese American to serve in Congress or the poorest member of the Louisiana delegates, but because he is the only Republican vote out of 177 in favor of the Democratic …

Makeup is magical in its ability to make us something we’re not, but can it go too far? Enter the recent trends of “blackface” and “colorface,” where white models or artistes are painted to impersonate other races.
This resurgence began with the Australian show “Hey Hey It’s Saturday” in which a cover group called the Jackson Jive performed in blackface, to mostly negative feedback. The trend is resurfacing in fashion as well: the Oct. 2009 French Vogue edition has Dutch model Lara Stone painted to look black (and dressed in requisite …

Few people think their high school mascot is cool, and I’ll admit that I thought mine, the “Mustang,” was the epitome of generic. Yet after seeing the mascot for East High School in Akron, OH, all those hideous horse murals don’t seem so terrible after all.
East High School’s mascot is the “Orientals,” complete with a dragon named “Chang” and a website with the faux Asian font commonly found on Chinese take-out cartons. Nor is it the only school that uses racial characters as its representations: East High School in Rochester, …

Katie Kitamura likes a good fight.
She may have attended Princeton University and earned a PhD in English. She may be a featherweight Asian American ballerina. However, her debut book “The Long Shot” isn’t about pliés or the world of cutthroat academics. Instead, “The Long Shot” centers around a topic that one would think is distinctively out of her realm of knowledge: mixed martial arts (MMA).

The typical life of an Asian American teenager: go to school, study, do homework, eat, go to bed.
Not so fast.
Chinese American Davina Wan’s teenage life was anything but scholarly. From age 12 to 17, she was part of an all-girl gang in the Lower East Side in New York, entrenched in a lifestyle foreign to most of us: danger instead of academic stress, intense loyalty instead of high school bickering, and most notably, while we were attending proms, she went to 35 funerals before the age of 18.

If anyone thinks we live in a post-racial world, she only needs to talk to 20-year-old Lou Jing to have that myth dispelled.
Lou was a recent finalist on “Let’s Go, Chinese Angels!” (“Jiayou, Dongfang Tianshi”), a Chinese reality television show similar to “American Idol.” Her presence skyrocketed the show’s interest and prompted national debate about identity due to a single factor: the color of her skin.

Ever since the phenomenally successful Stuff White People Like website debuted in 2008, it was only a matter of time until other versions appeared. I present to you now: Stuff Asian People Like.
The website features a list of 124 (and growing) things Asian people like, updated daily. There are the expected (academics, rice), but the true genius of the site is stumbling across an entry about a cultural quirk you never noticed before and finding yourself yelling “That’s so true!”

From the flip of a coin to principal soloist in the San Francisco Ballet’s China debut, ballerina Yuan Yuan Tan has come full circle.
Born in Shanghai, Tan discovered passion for dance early in life — an interest her mother supported and her father opposed. Her parents decided to leave the decision up to a coin toss, a fateful move that landed in favor of dance, putting Tan on the road to becoming the most acclaimed ballerina to ever hail from China.

It’s time the world knows about Asian American artists other than just Maya Lin, and the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) is here for that exact purpose.
Celebrating 20 years of “Vision, Vitality and Visibility,” AAWAA is hosting an art exhibition from Sept. 22 to Oct. 24 at SOMArts Cultural Center located in San Francisco.