B-Ball Blunder: Racist NBA player yet to apologize (in National News) Equality for All: SFUSD plan targets racial disparities (in Bay Area News) Business in the Aftermath of Census 2000 (in Business) Asian American Oscar predictions (in A&E) Emil Amok: Roundball Asian Gals and the Census (in Opinion)

New Books for You to Read

Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America

David L. Eng (Duke University Press)

Columbia University Professor David Eng discusses Asian American male sexuality at the intersection of specific cultural productions and psychoanalytic paradigms. Yes, this is definitely one to go onto the list of those 200-level Asian American studies classes out there. But don’t skip over it, because Eng takes the conversation in a new direction by analyzing the works of Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang and Ang Lee and dissecting Asian American male subjectivity. Eng asks the question: Does psychoanalysis have a place in Asian American and ethnic studies? By dropping the words of Freud and Lacan into turn-of-the-century Chinatowns across America, Eng shows how race actively changes psychoanalytic theory and reorganizes conventional understandings of diaspora into terms of sexuality and queerness. Not exactly a beach book, but a really interesting take on a much discussed issue.

---

Father of the Four Passages

Lois-Ann Yamanaka (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Hawaii’s controversial poet-novelist is back with the story of art student/lounge singer/mother Sonia Kurisu. Sonia lives in Las Vegas in a world of memories, hallucinatory visions of her three aborted fetuses and the protracted crying of her son. Yamanaka again employs her wild, fragmented story telling style which allows the reader to become nearly as lost as Sonia herself. “Salamander fingers, you cling to my wet walls until your body rips apart. You are the color of tendon in my sweet stew . . . .” Always the master of finding the magic and poetry in the down-and-dirty details of life, Yamanaka takes us down Sonia’s stumbling road to redemption with her usual bold style.

---

Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago

Luis H. Francia (Kaya Books)

Part travel guide, part history book and part personal map, Francia’s Eye of the Fish goes deep into the heart of the Philippines, documenting several decades of travel and exploration. Francia takes on everything from his own identity as a Filipino living on the island of Manhattan to the real story of Lapu-Lapu, the warrior who killed Magellan. In a series of untitled chapters, Francia goes everywhere that could define the islands of his birth: the mountain hideaways of revolutionary freedom fighters, leper colonies, the huts of island shamans, the salons of the aristocracy, drowsy city streets after lunch. The poetic detail of Francia’s language captures his journey the best: “My dreams on Siquijor begin to be filled with snakes, especially the sawa, or python. My dream figures are serpentine, some enchantingly beautiful, some grotesque.” This book attempts to understand the “richly dark metaphor” that is the Philippines.