Category Archives: Hyphen Magazine

Blog posts for the Hyphen magazine blog, including web column “Idealize This!: Hyphen’s Handbook for Practical Idealists.”

Nov 14 0 comments
Blog, Hyphen Magazine

Hyphen issue 24 out now!

Winter '11 | "Medical Malpractice?"Don’t for­get to pick up Hyphen issue 24, which is now on (some) new­stands! You can also sub­scribe, or check it out online.

Once inside, you can read my fea­ture the sur­vival of a group of Fil­ipino nurses in the face of work­place dis­crim­i­na­tion, bud­get cuts and sweep­ing changes in the health indus­try, as well as:

Con­tribut­ing Edi­tor Nicole Wong’s visu­al­iza­tion of the Cen­sus num­bers, which illu­mi­nates how the Asian Amer­i­can com­mu­nity is grow­ing and changing.

Books Edi­tors Abi­gail Licad and Cath­lin Goulding’s round­table of poetry experts which exam­ines how Asian Amer­i­can poetry is endur­ing decades after com­mu­nity activists used it as a polit­i­cal tool.

And Meeta Kaur’s essay: “Liv­ing with a tur­ban in a post-9/11 world.”

…among many other offerings.

Nov 10 2 comments
Blog, Hyphen Magazine

The fraught history of Filipino nursing in the U.S.

I’ve been want­ing to do a story on Fil­ipino nurs­ing in the U.S. for some time and, this year, Hyphen gave me the oppor­tu­nity to do so, even facil­i­tat­ing fund­ing of the project through Spot.us. Issue 24, which is out this month, fea­tures a story I wrote about alleged dis­crim­i­na­tion against Fil­ip­ina nurses on the part of hos­pi­tal man­age­ment all over the coun­try. I focused on one hos­pi­tal in San Fran­cisco, St. Luke’s, where nurses claim hos­pi­tal man­age­ment enacted an ille­gal hir­ing ban against Filipinos—in an effort to squelch union activ­ity among the largely Fil­ipino nurs­ing staff.

It was a very chal­leng­ing story to write—not least because the nurses were (and con­tinue to be) in the midst of a bit­ter labor dis­pute with the hos­pi­tal chain. The dynam­ics of union con­tract nego­ti­a­tions are com­plex and both sides spin, spin, spin until you can’t left from right any­more. In the end, I’m still not sure what hap­pened at that hos­pi­tal. My great fear is that this arti­cle may not reflect that uncer­tainty as much as I would like it to.

But I hope the bot­tom line is clear: Regard­less of what did hap­pen at St. Luke’s, Fil­ip­ina nurses have—and do—suffer sys­temic inequal­i­ties within the Amer­i­can health care sys­tem. The best part of this project was learn­ing the long, fraught his­tory of Fil­ipino nurs­ing in the U.S.: How overtly racist notions drove Amer­i­can efforts to “san­i­tize” the Fil­ipino peo­ple in the early 20th cen­tury; how U.S. hos­pi­tals began recruit­ing Fil­ip­inas to bust up AMer­i­can nurs­ing  unions in the mid-century; how nurs­ing unions exploited cul­tural stereo­types and prop­a­gated gross mis­con­cep­tions of Fil­ipino nurses in order to limit their recruit­ment in the 1960s and 1970s; and how Fil­ipino nurses man­aged to carve out a place for them­selves and climb the ranks of nurs­ing unions in the 1990s…only to feel the back­lash of anti-immigrant sen­ti­ment in the 2000s.

My inter­est in the topic is also a bit per­sonal, as many women in my fam­ily are health­care work­ers who were trained in the Philip­pines, migrated to the U.S. to work, and send remit­tances back home. My lit­tle sis­ter, who turned 20 this week, is in nurs­ing school in Bicol province right now. Since she’s already an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen, she won’t have to worry about being recruited or get­ting a Visa, but will rather effort­lessly head back to the States next year to try to find a nurs­ing a job. I’m excited about being reunited with her. But, know­ing what I now know about the myr­iad obsta­cles she may encounter as a foreign-trained nurse try­ing to make it in the U.S., I can’t help but worry, a lit­tle bit, about what her future will turn out to be.

Hope you check out the story at Hyphen, and con­sider sub­scrib­ing to the print mag­a­zine (it’s chang­ing dra­mat­i­cally next year, and you’ll want to see what sur­prises are in store…). Also check out spot.us, where you can sup­port com­mu­nity jour­nal­ism projects (It was started by one of my instruc­tors at Berkeley!)

Feb 25 0 comments
Hyphen Magazine

The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion

Review for Hyphen | Reposted at Racia­li­cious and Dia­CRIT­ICS

Per­haps the most cel­e­brated Fall col­lec­tions to debut at this year’s Fash­ion Week were those that cre­atively incor­po­rated tech­nol­ogy. Sev­eral design­ers show­cased computer-generated prints, retool­ing tra­di­tional craft tex­tiles into com­put­er­ized pat­terns com­pris­ing ultra mod­ern gar­ments. But even as fash­ion crit­ics over­whelm­ingly cel­e­brated this pre­pon­der­ance of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion, most seemed sim­i­larly enam­ored of Ralph Lauren’s far less pio­neer­ing embrace of one of fashion’s old­est tropes: Shang­hai Chic. Crit­ics eagerly ded­i­cated valu­able col­umn inches to the col­lec­tion, which fea­tured all the main­stays of Asian-inspired fash­ion: jade jew­elry, golden drag­ons, cheongsams. While some can­didly won­dered whether the designer’s invo­ca­tion of China was a state­ment about the nation’s grow­ing eco­nomic com­pet­i­tive­ness, oth­ers were sim­ply happy to break out as many tired euphemisms for “East­ern” as pos­si­ble. (Not only did the “Ori­ent Express” make sev­eral stops but East, inevitably, met West.)

The famil­iar sce­nario aptly rein­forces a key obser­va­tion made by cul­ture critic Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu in her newly pub­lished book,  The Beau­ti­ful Gen­er­a­tion: “Even when freed to dream and invent,” she writes, “[design­ers] seem only to return to long-held ideas about an exotic and erotic orient.”

The phe­nom­e­non Nguyen Tu describes, of Euro-American design­ers’ quixotic and cycli­cal infat­u­a­tion with an often undif­fer­en­ti­ated “East,” has for — lit­er­ally — hun­dreds of years dic­tated Asia’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in one of the largest and old­est indus­tries to date. Asia, in the deft hands of fash­ion indus­try titans, is at once a sump­tu­ous fan­tasy and a con­ven­tion in need of con­stant rein­ter­pre­ta­tion; both an inex­pen­sive man­u­fac­tur­ing site and — as one New York Times critic made a point of men­tion­ing with regard to the Ralph Lau­ren col­lec­tion — an expan­sive con­sumer mar­ket. Get the whole story »

Feb 02 0 comments
Hyphen Magazine

Australia’s War on Small Breasts

Orig­i­nally posted at Hyphen on Feb­ru­ary 1, 2010

As if we small-breasted ladies didn’t have it hard enough. We per­se­vered through ado­les­cences marred by a dev­as­tat­ing lack of top-growth, endured comings-of-age min­i­mized by the diminu­tive jabs of our bustier peers, and, as adults, find our­selves woe­fully rel­e­gated to Victoria’s Secret’s young teen “Pink” sec­tion, from where we cov­etously eye the per­fectly imprac­ti­cal lacy/strappy/barely-there/disgustingly-provocative under­things so accessibly-sized for plumper patrons. Since child­hood, men, mag­a­zines, and our moth­ers have ridiculed our rel­a­tive lack of endow­ment, so maybe it was only a mat­ter of time before whole gov­ern­ments made our bitty busts their busi­ness. Get the whole story »