Asian American Culture · Food · Career · Entertainment
For the 24 million Asian Americans whose experiences, perspectives, and communities are underrepresented everywhere else.
The rise of boba bubble tea from underground Asian American staple to mainstream phenomenon happened faster than almost anyone predicted. Bubble tea was invented in Taiwan in the 1980s — depending on which origin story you believe, either at Chun Shui Tang teahouse in Taichung, where a product development manager named Lin Hsiu Hui mixed…
Second generation Asian American cooking has its own signature: a weeknight fried rice finished with fish sauce and chili crisp, a pasta tossed with miso butter. There’s a dish that appears, in some variation, in the kitchens of second-generation Asian Americans across the country. It doesn’t have a name. It’s the thing you make on…
Japanese Korean Chinese BBQ are three completely different culinary traditions that share almost nothing beyond the concept of meat and fire. Ask someone who’s only been to one kind what “Asian BBQ” is and they’ll describe what they know. Ask someone who’s been to all three and they’ll tell you the question doesn’t really work…
The Asian American independent voter is a growing reality that defies easy categorization. For decades, Asian Americans were treated as a monolithic voting bloc — first assumed to lean Republican due to small-business ownership and social conservatism, then reliably Democratic after the 1990s. Neither assumption was ever quite right. And today, as the Asian American…
Asian American leaving religion is happening across communities — quietly, incrementally, often invisibly. Asian Americans leaving their parents’ religions rarely do it dramatically. The conversation usually doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in small defections — skipping the service, not correcting someone who assumes you still practice, giving vague answers when relatives ask about…
Asian American mental health is a crisis hiding in plain sight. Asian Americans have the lowest rates of mental health service utilization of any racial group in the United States. This is not because Asian Americans have fewer mental health needs — the data suggests the opposite. It is because of a specific set of…
Saving face Asian American culture imposes a specific burden that is rarely named directly. For Asian Americans, saving face is not just a social norm — it is a moral framework and, often, an invisible tax. There is no exact English translation for “saving face.” The closest approximation is something like “preserving one’s dignity in…
The model minority myth is most often encountered as a compliment. Asian Americans are hardworking, they’re told. Academically successful. Quiet, law-abiding, professionally accomplished. The model minority. What’s the problem? The problem, it turns out, is everything — and it starts with where the myth came from, which has almost nothing to do with Asian Americans…
The bamboo ceiling — coined by Jane Hyun in her 2005 book of the same name. Two decades later, the phenomenon it describes hasn’t gone away. Asian Americans remain dramatically underrepresented in corporate leadership — not just in C-suites, but in senior management roles across industries — despite being among the most highly educated demographic…
Filipino restaurants Los Angeles has built over decades reflect the second-largest Filipino American population in the United States, and for decades the LA community quietly fed itself — at turo-turo steam tables, at lechon stands in Carson and Eagle Rock, at family-run spots that didn’t need a Yelp page to stay full. That era isn’t…
Asian grocery store staples can transform your cooking. Walk into any Asian grocery store — H Mart, 99 Ranch, Seafood City, your local Korean market — and you’ll find an overwhelming amount of options. Dozens of soy sauces. An entire aisle of noodles. Fish sauce in sizes ranging from a small bottle to what appears…
Vietnamese coffee has arrived. If you’ve walked into an independent coffee shop recently, you’ve probably noticed something on the menu that wasn’t there five years ago. Between the oat milk lattes and the cold brews, there’s a new regular: cà phê sữa đá. Vietnamese iced coffee. And it’s not just a trend. It’s a takeover….