WHAT'S NEW - in the month of August 2001!

As we enter August 2001, we have seen the opening of many films featuring Asian Americans, the success of Asian ballplayers promoting goodwill, Bush's APA appointments, etc. These situations are just starting to correct the conclusions found in ADL's recent report on "Racisim towards Asian/Chinese Americans."

Review the latests events and people to observe the APA communities' progress.

FEATURED ARTISTS & LEADERS

SABEER BHATIA
Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith founded Hotmail in 1996, one of the Internet's first Web-based e-mail service providers on $300,000. In December of 1997, Bhatia sold the company to Microsoft for an estimated $400 million.

According to Wired Magazine, Hotmail's user base has grown faster than any media company in history -- faster than CNN, AOL or even the audience of the 90's hit show Seinfeld.

Bhatia, 30, was born in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley. He graduated with a B.S. in electrical engineering at CalTech and later earned his master's degree and Ph.D. at Stanford, where he met Smith. Before HotMail, he worked at Apple Computers and Firepower Systems.

HotMail's concept was to give users free e-mail with the only prerequisite being a Web-browser. Users can log on from home, work or even remote parts of Europe and Africa. Advertisers then pay for space to reach their specific demographic which Hotmail delivers through one of the most diverse user bases on the Internet.

Bhatia is regarded as an Indian success story in his homeland and led President Clinton to remark to the Indian Prime Minister in 1998 of the impact that Indians are having in Silicon Valley.

DON HO

The younger the couple
The tighter the squeeze
--Don Ho, from "E Lei Ka Lei Lei
(Beach Party Song)"

Ho, at 71 in 2001, with his distinctive whiskey-baritone voice, remains the leading exponent of "Love Hawaiian Style" that's been undiminished by four decades of nonstop performing.

Most people know only three things about Hawaii: Diamond Head, Pearl Harbor and Don Ho.

Don was born in the little Honolulu neighborhood of Kakaako of Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, German parentage. His career started at a Oahu cocktail lounge Honey's.

In 1962, Ho began playing at Duke's, with the "Allis" as his backup band, in Waikiki and became a huge success and phenemon.. His success brought him a two-week engagement at Hollywood's ultra-posh Cocoanut Grove in 1966 that broke all previous attendance records that led to additional SRO crowds.

In addition, he's performed at the Sands in Las Vegas, Harrah's at Lake Tahoe, the Palmer House in Chicago, the Americana Hotel's Royal Box in New York, TV guest appearances with Johnny Carson, Joey Bishop and Art Linkletter, and his own hour-long color TV special--not to mention a clutch of best-selling LP record albums for Reprise.

His television appearances include episodes of The Brady Bunch, Charlie's Angels, and The Fall Guy. From October 1976 to March 1977, he hosted a half-hour daytime variety series, The Don Ho Show, broadcast over ABC-TV. By the 1990s, he had launched his own label, Honey Records, to release his recordings and others by island favorites. He continued to make occasional TV appearances and in 1996 had a small part in the film Joe's Apartment.

Ho was named by trendy-libidinous Maxim magazine as one of its "50 Coolest Guys Ever."

It has been said that Don is is "the Hawaiian equivalent to Frank, Sammy and Dean in Vegas."

L. LING-CHI WANG

This Hong Kong immigrant has been described as a Chinese Martin Luther King, visionary, a warrior who runs at full gallop without losing his balance and a Renaissance man with a heart of Buddha.

For the past three decades, this respected professor, director of Berkeley's Asian American studies department and an uncompromising community activist has been addressing important issues.

He fought for bilingual education in public schools, fought the tougher admissions standards imposed to curb a disproportionately high Asian American enrollment at the nation's elite schools, chaired a UC Asian language task force that persuaded the College Board to offer the SAT II achievement test in Chinese, Japanese and Korean and played a strategist role in the Wen Ho Lee case,

"Being perpetual aliens is the first defining characteristic of Asian Americans," he said. Americans of Asian ancestry are "presumed foreigners," even if they are fifth-generation California natives. This prejudice, he says, is rooted in the master narrative of American history that tells us the nation was founded, settled and built by whites.

It has been said that "He framed and built the foundation of the Asian American civil rights movement as we know it today."

EVENTS IN HISTORY

IN 1830's
- Chinese workers arrives in Hawaii

IN 1869
- Memphis TN conference of plantation owners proposed substituting Chinese labor for black slaves.

IN 1871
- Nineteen Chinese were massacred in Los Angeles. October 24 marked the worst incident of Anti-Chinese violence in America up to that time.

IN 1879
- the Arizona Weekly Star ran an editorial in 1879 portraying Chinese Americans as "an ignorant, filthy, leprous horde" and "the most pernicious and degraded race on the globe." Chinese workers were attacked in railroad camps and mining towns and driven out of Arizona's mines and railroads.

IN 1898
- Hawaii is the United States' 50th state.

IN 1903
- Korean workers are brought to Hawaii

IN 1908
- Filipinos were greatly recruited by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association as cheap contract labor when the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 cut off the Japanese supply.

IN 1909
- Japanese plantation workers in Hawaii go on strike

IN 1912
- Duke Kahanamoku won his first Olympic gold medal and set a world record in the 100-meter free-style and won a silver medal as a participant in the 200-meter relay in Stockholm. He represented the United States in the Olympics for the next 20 years.

IN 1920
- Asian Indians owned about 123,000 acres in California's Imperial and Sacramento Valleys.

IN 1923
- Justice Sutherland, speaking for the Supreme Court in 1923, said that Bhagat Singh Thind and other Asian Indians were aliens ineligible to citizenship because they were not white, as only whites and blacks could become citizens.

IN 1924
- In the Hanapepe Massacre, police attack union headquarters in Hanapepe, HI where 16 sugar plantation workers and 4 policemen are killed.

IN 1947
- Truman grants full pardon to the Japanese Americans who had been convicted for resisting the draft while they and their families were held in concentration camps.

IN 1944
- These 85 interned Japanese Americans were prosecuted and incarcerated because they refused to be drafted into the U.S. military unless their rights as citizens were restored.

IN 1949
- FBI arrests the Hawaii Seven for communist activity. Their fines and jail terms are overturned in January 1958.

IN 1973
- Organization of Chinese Americans, Inc. was founded. (OCA) is a national non-profit, non-partisan advocacy organization of concerned Chinese Americans. dedicated to securing the rights of Chinese American and Asian American citizens and permanent residents.

IN 1978
- National convention of the Japanese American Citizens League adopts resolution calling for redress and reparations for the internment of Japanese Americans.

IN 1980
- First Philippine Festival of the Arts begins in New York City.

IN 1991
- National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium (NAPALC), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization was formed to advance the legal and civil rights of Asian Pacific Americans.

IN 2000
- Ellery J. Chun, creator of the "Aloha Shirt" dies.

IN 2001
- Maya Lin is honored by the NAACP as someone who has excelled in the face of overwhelming odds.

IN 2001
- Patrick Oliphant's racist cartoon was an offshoot of the recent stand off between the U.S. and China over the U.S. spy plane incident.


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