POV you're Jamie's iPad that she forgot to bring on vacation to draw covers with
It's already the end of May wow... hope you all got a chance to celebrate AAPI Heritage in any small or big ways! today's newsletter is a quick TIL (Today I Learned), which we hope you enjoy! 😌 in other significant news, both of us have signed our leases for the new cities we'll be living in for the next year! time flies...
Update: Until both of us get settled in our respective new places, the next few weeks will be a more pared-down version of the weekly newsletter. It's summer time babyyyyyy!!
Love,
Jamie and Melinda ❤️
What We're Reading & Learning
📚 Since it's almost summer, we wanted to share our potential summer reading list! Let us know if you want to read any of these and we can read them together. LET US KNOW IF YOU HAVE ANY RECS!
We Too SingAmerica by Deepa Iyer. (Subtitle: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multi-Racial Future) Thanks for this suggestion, Angeline!
How Much of These Hills is Gold by C. Pam Zhang (her debut novel)
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (novel and Booker Prize winner)
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (NYT fiction bestseller and new Hulu miniseries)
The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for scifi)
And more here!
I'm currently reading All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, which has been great so far. It's a series of essays by "dozens of diverse women leading on climate in the United States." I think there are only 2 Asian writers (Jainey Bavishi and Varshini Prakash), which makes me want to learn more about Asian American climate leaders/activists (we did spotlight Brown Girl Green in a previous newsletter)
Unlike Melinda, I'm only reading fiction and trashy beach reads. If you want to join me in (finally) reading Emergency Contact by Mary Choi (it kinda reads like a long fanfiction, but in exactly the way you want it to hit), please lmk. Also starting The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro soon!
🎖️ TIL: Memorial Day, originally known as Decoration Day, began originally as an annual tribute for the many lives lost during the Civil War. That made me wonder... by the late 1800s there were def Asian folks living in the U.S. Did they fight in the war? Yes! (my middle/high school brain never wondered this, and this wasn't mentioned in class obviously. war is something I still don't fully understand and feel averse to, but this was interesting to learn...)
Apparently, at least 58 Chinese people fought on the Union side of the war. (One guy named Edward Day Cohota, who was adopted by a merchant when he was found on a ship from Shanghai, is shown below.) Most Chinese people fought on the Union side, but some were on the Confederate side, including two guys (conjoined twins) named Chang and Eng Bunker. You can read more about this here.
Source: Monty Hom via NBC News - The earliest known photo of Edward Day Cohota, likely taken after the Civil War.
👌 Other Links a.k.a. Chef's Specials
‼️ Ongoing: Sharing resources to help with COVID response and care in India. Please take a look!
🍑 "How a Tamil woman's sex toy company is breaking taboos in the South Asian community" (her company is called Thaen Pot and it's based in Toronto)
📜 The 2021 National Youth Poet Laureate is Alexandra Huynh, a 2nd-Generation Vietnamese American from Sacramento and incoming freshman at Stanford. In 2020, Meera Dasgupta of New York was the youngest and 1st Asian American to be named National Youth Poet Laureate; she's an incoming student at UChicago.
🥞 This is the closest emoji I found to Butter, the name of the new BTS song that's smashed 5 world records. TBH i'm not the biggest fan of this song, but good for them!
🏀 Bye-bye Jeremy Lin :'(. Read his reflections here on leaving the NBA.
🎵 AAPI Month is coming to an end and Pride Month is coming soon... so check out this AAPI Pride playlist on Spotify!
small feelings
I rarely cry and this morning after being reminded about George Floyd's death 1 year ago, I started crying about how much loss—in every sense—marginalized communities have had to experience in our white-centric (is that the right word?), patriarchal, and overall incredibly inequitable world. ☹️
✨ S P O T L I G H T ✨
The Linda Lindas
In typical alt fashion, I'm glad I knew about The Linda Lindas before this viral video of their singing/playing "Racist, Sexist Boy" at an LA Public Library went viral last week (above). Ok, it was not long before—I discovered them when they were featured in the movie Moxie on Netflix (the movie was cute and good in some ways, but deserves criticism too).
Anyhow, The Linda Lindas is an all-girl, half-Asian, half-Latinx punk band (low key wish I were them). The members are: 10-year-old Mila and her 14-year-old sister, Lucia, their 13-year-old cousin Eloise, and their 16-year-old friend Bela. Mila encountered a boy in class who told her that his dad said to stay away from Chinese people; he then recoiled when he learned that she was Chinese. This experience is the reason they wrote this above song.
Maybe in part due to the viral video, they just signed with Epitaph Records! Before last week, they already had recognition, having opened up for Bikini Kill, the name you see on Mila's shirt. For context, Bikini Kill is an all-women American punk bank that started in 1990, sort of a pinnacle during the start of third-wave (white) feminism. Pretty revolutionary, but very white. So it makes me happy that these non-white girls are taking on punk rock! 👩🏼🎤
Events
Today at 6:30pm ET: Celebrating Representation and Inclusion of Disabled AAPI in Media - FB Event Link / Zoom link found here
OUR LINKS
🐥 Twitter: @around_thetable
🌶️ Insta: @around_thetable_
Anonymous Feedback Form: https://forms.gle/198r2Tgu9ZYfTbCj7
Spotlight Form: https://forms.gle/AD5vGqgNbSYWn5wJ7
AAPI Artists Spotify Playlist (no longer collaborative because random Italian DJs kept adding their own songs) :