Panda Express

Asian or not, Panda Express seems to be the most popular Chinese food place. As we learned from the food unit in our Asian American Culture class, Panda Express is 90% Americanize, maybe that’s why everyone likes it so much. It’s Chinese food with an American twist to it. At Stonestown, Panda Express always seems to have the longest line. But why? Can it be because it’s cheap? because its fast? Or perhaps is it because Panda Express’ food is really that good.

I went to Los Angeles last weekend and my family and I went to each lunch at a Café place in Universal Studios. This café served a variety of food items such as fried chicken, panda express, pizza, hot dogs, and others. As I waited in line, I looked around to see what kind of food people were eating and I saw a lot of people eating Panda Express; majority of which were not Asian. I guess everyone was just in a Chinese food mood that day. After I got my food and sat down, one lady even stopped to ask me where I got my Chinese food. And shortly after we ran and got her whole family and went to go get some.

Another time a friend was telling me how he brought some panda express and gave some to his Mexican friend and that friend fell in loved with it. Better than any imitation Chinese food they have down in Mexico. When his friend came to visit from Mexico, the one place he requested to eat at before he left was Panda Express. The friend tried other Chinese restaurants before, but his favorite is still Panda Express. Again, perhaps its because Panda Express is made to acquire the American taste.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against Panda Express food, but at the same time I don’t see what the craze about Panda Express is either. But then again, I guess I can’t really say much because I’m not really a big fan on Chinese food either. I’ll eat it, but it’s not very appetizing to me partly because I eat it too much. But it’s just a question that’s being floating around in my mind, what’s so good about Panda Express?

Poem by Nellie Wong

Mama, Come Back Mama, come back. Why did you leave now that I am learning you? The landlady next door how she apologizes for my rough brown skin to her tenant from Hong Kong as if I were her daughter, as if she were you. How do I say I miss you your scolding your presence your roast loin of pork more succulent, more tender than any hotel chef's? The fur coat you wanted making you look like a polar bear and the mink-trimmed coat I once surprised you on Christmas morning. Mama, how you said "importment" for important, your gold tooth flashing an insecurity you dared not bare, wanting recognition simply as eating noodles and riding in a motor car to the supermarket the movie theater adorned in your gold and jade as if all your jewelry confirmed your identity a Chinese woman in America. How you said "you better" always your last words glazed through your dark eyes following me fast as you could one November evening in New York City how I thought "Hello, Dolly!" showed you an America you never saw. How your fear of being alone kept me dutiful in body resentful in mind. How my fear of being single kept me from moving out. How I begged your forgiveness after that one big fight how I wasn't wrong but needed you to love me as warmly as you hugged stranger

You don’t realize how much you love someone until that person is gone from your life. You don’t realize how much you take someone for granted until the day they are gone. You don’t realize how much you miss someone until the day you realize they are never coming back. And this is all very true. We are so into our own lives and our own interest that we take people around us for granted. We boss people around for our own pleasing. We say things to people we don’t really mean. We get mad at people when things don’t go our way, but its not until they day that person has left our lives that we realize what a terrible friend or family member we are. But usually by then it’s too late. We want to take things back but we can’t. We want to apologize but we can’t. We want to see them one last time to tell them we love them, but again we can’t. A lot of times, I know I can say so for myself, we are blinded by our own interest that we don’t see how much of an impact others are in our lives. We don’t realize that by our selfish acts we push the most important people in out lives away. And we finally do realize it. It is too late. So, by thankful for those around you don’t go anything you’ll regret later. Tell those you love how much you love them and how thankful you are for them before it’s too late.

I found this poem really inspiring. And it just makes me think about how much my mother has done for me and yet I fail to thank her. I can’t even imagine how my left would be if my mother was gone. This poem actually reminded me of a poem I wrote for my great grandmother when she left us. Just acknowledging and realizing how much she impacted my life and just not being able to thank her for everything. It just reminds me that life is too short. Live life to the fullest and again to just remember to tell those you love you love them and how thankful you are for them to be apart of your life.

Poet: Bio of Nellie Wong

On September 12 1934, Nellie Wong was born in Oakland, California to Chinese immigrants. During World War II, the internment of her Japanese American neighbors left a huge impact in her life. It brought to her attention the issues of racism and the concerns of Asian Americans. In her mid-30’s, Nellie began studying creative writing at San Francisco State University. She was inspired by her feminist classmate who encouraged her to write ad publish her poetry. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Nellie co-founded the Asian American feminist literary and performance group “Unbound Feet”. She traveled to China on the first U.S. Women Writers Tour and was also a speaker for many national and regional conferences. She has taught Women’s studies at the University of Minnesota and poetry writing at Mills College in Oakland, California. Now, she is currently residing in San Francisco, California.

I wasn't able to get a book of her poetries, but I was able to find a couple of her pieces online that I can work with. I'm excited to read her work and hear what she has to say about being a female Asian American living in California.

I decided to pick Nellie Wong as my poet because in some ways she reminds me of myself so i figured perhaps I would be able to relate to some of her writings. As I was reading her poems, one of her poems was about her going into a Chinese Bakery and encountering a white man speaking Cantonese. The way she responded to him is exactly how I would have reacted. Her poems also reminded me of the book The Dim Sum of All Things by Kim Wong Keltner which I really enjoyed reading so I figured I would enjoy Nellie’s writing too. Another reason I picked her was because she went to SFSU which I found really surprising. It's not everyday where you find out you went to the same school as a writer or any other famous person.

Justin Chin

Justin Chin at Progressive Reading Series - March 2008 Save Rent Control
Originally uploaded by Steve Rhodes

Justin Chin was born in Malaysia, raised in Singapore, moved to Hawaii, and now lives in San Francisco. In an interview with Frigatezine, he explains that, as a kid, he wanted to be a mad scientist "driven not by evilness, but by some sense of wanting to be saved and redeemed and converted to goodness by the hero," but his parents wanted him to be a doctor. He strayed from both aspirations, obviously, and is now a poet and performance artist, claiming to have stumbled into poetry by accident—"mostly by way of rock music and top-forty pop." His writing spans numerous topics and themes, including childhood experiences, queer life, consumerism, and immigration—all with a touch of wit and brutal honesty. To date, he has published three poetry books (Bite Hard, Harmless Medicine, and Gutted) and two collections of non-fiction essays (Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes & Pranks and Burden of Ashes). As a performance artist in the 90s, he created eight full-length solo works, which are all published in his book, Attack of the Man-Eating Lotus Blossoms.

I first discovered Justin Chin's work while perusing the Asian American section of the SFSU Bookstore with Sharon. Flipping through Harmless Medicine, I came across "Neo Testament," a short poetic prose, which starts off with:

Jesus had a twin named Ted. Ted Christ. Ted was neither godly nor evil. He was just indifferent. Jesus hated Ted. He prayed everyday for Ted's crib death, and God listened. Jesus soon regretted his decision and held his breath until God resurrected Ted, but on a different day, so he would not have to share birthdays.

His sense of humor appealed to me, and I made my decision right then and there to choose him as my poet for this class.

AA POET BIO; Ai

"Ai is the only name by which I wish, and indeed, should be known." - Ai

Ai – a word meaning “love” in Japanese – became the pen name for Florence Anthony. Born on October 21, 1947, in Albany, Texas, she also lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles as a child. “There were good times, but they were always eclipsed by bad times,” Ai recounts for she was impoverished in San Francisco. Ai’s multicultural background – a Japanese father and a Choctaw, Cheyenne, African American, Dutch and Scots-Irish mother – is what keeps her life interesting and is an inspiration for her work. At the age of fourteen Ai began writing poetry to enter a poetry contest, but her family moved back to Tucson before she could submit her entry. Even though she didn’t enter the contest because she had to move, Ai realized that she had skill with the pen. She graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelor degree in Japanese, and also has a M.F.A from UC-Irvine.   She writes about things that come to her through real life happenings as described by the media or personal experience.  For example, she can be listening to the radio or watching the news and she hears a particular lyric or newscast that catches her interest.

I decided to choose Ai and her poetry book "Vice" for many reasons. The very first aspect of her that pulled me was her ethnicity, with her background there are vast cultural stories that I can be exposed to and i really like to experience different cultures. The next was her style of writing. She writes about "off-the-wall" and unusual topics that are "hard" to talk about; including sex, rape, etc. this dark side is what i like to read about because it's so different than my real life livings, yet i can relate and it comforts me to know that another person feels the same way i do. After these realizations, i researched and came across some of her poems, and i was hooked onto the mysterious and ambiguous words.

There are several poems that i'm thinking about using, yet i still have yet to pick only three. they are called "The Prisoner", "Talking to His Reflection in a Shallow Pond", and "Blue Suede Shoes", "More", and "Elegy." The first prisoner deals with being interrogated as a terrorist and how much freedom means to a person that has been a PRISONER for so long. The next poem of course has to deal with identity and the cultural struggle with finding that identity balance in America. Next, im not very sure if i understood this poem correctly, but the way i see it, Ai is basically touching upon what a "REAL AMERICAN" is and looks like. what personality and what type of job they are obligated to. next, "More" has to deal with WANTING america, and wanting that American dream as someone who is a minority who cannot achieve the full "american experience." lastly, "Elegy" describes a city undergoing a war.

Asian American Poet

Cathy Song is a Korean-Chinese poet born in Hawaii in 1955. She resists being labeled as an "Asian American writer," and instead calls herself "a poet who happens to be Asian American. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Cathy Song participates in Hawaii's "Poets in the Schools" program, which allows students from kindergarden to high school to work with poets and learn about poetry. She says the program is very rewarding and she learns as much from the students as they do from her.

Cathy's published books are; Picture Bride (1983), Frameless Windows, Squares of Light (1988), School Figures (1994), and The Land of Bliss (2001). Her first poetry book, Picture Bride, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1983, and she won quite a few awards thereafter; the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Hawaii Award for Literature, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

A picture bride is a marriage arranged through the exchange of photographs, which was how her mother and her father met, by way of their parents. She writes about women's issues, motherhood, family, and tries to acknowledge the many roles women play in society. She is inflenced by her own family, and tries to tell her families' stories in her poetry.


I chose this poet because Cathy Song is a female writer that writes about how it is like being female and Asian American. Her poems are easy to read and understand, and I can relate to what she writes about.
Well, that's what I'd like to say but the truth is Katrina borrowed an extra poetry book from the library and I really needed a poet to write about. I ended up liking it quite a bit.

Bio - Pic of AA Poet Frances Chung

For the poetry unit of the class, I choose the Chinese American poet Frances Chung (1950 to 1990). She was born and raised at the border of New York’s Chinatown and Little Italy. Her mother and father are Chee Kin and Wilbur Chung, and she has an older sister Edna. At Smith College, she got a degree in mathematics and after graduating she taught at public schools in the Lower East Side of New York.

There is not much about her online, but I gather that most of her poetry is for her to let out her thoughts and experiences. The book I found is Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple – The Poems of Frances Chung. The titles “Crazy Melon” and “Chinese Apple” are from two unpublished book manuscripts that were found in Chung’s papers. These poems show and describe her living in New York’s Chinatown in the 1960’s and 70’s. “Crazy Melon deftly sketches the streets, fantasies, commerce and toil of Chung’s neighborhoods, while the later Chinese Apple offers new themes and cityscapes – delightfully understated eroticism, tributes to poets, impressions of other Chinese diasporic communities around the world.” From the Commentary by Walter K Lew, Frances also really liked the bookmaking process and was passionate about authenticating her work to get it out in the world for people to read. She would even make her own paperback books with folded sheets of paper and the “Crazy Melon” manuscript was kept in a clear box where she taped a plum candy wrapper to the lid and stamped her red Chinese seal.

I found Frances Chung just by chance landing in the Asian American aisle at the SFSU Bookstore. Katrina and I were on break in-between classes and we were originally looking for a food book that I heard about, but we were a little lost and just so happened to be standing in front of the AA section. Then a light bulb went off that we should look for our poets and see if we could find any poetry books here. We ended up finding this book full of Asian American poets, called Yobo - Korean American Writing in Hawai‘i. When I got home I looked up some of the poets that wrote poems that I liked online and found Walter K Lew. Then I saw that his book was at the SFPL so I went to check it out, but it was missing and then I found Frances Chung’s book. I thought the title was cool so I flipped through it and read some of her poems and there you go – my poet.