From: shaw@au-bon-pain.lcs.mit.edu (Andy Shaw)
Subject: September issue of _Transpacific_
Organization: MIT Lab for Computer Science, Cambridge, Mass.
Distribution: soc
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 02:43:30 GMT


I picked up the September issue of _Transpacific_ magazine the other day,
which I tend to do whenever I see it on the newstand, which actually isn't
all that often.  Quite frankly, I'm not sure why I do it, since
_Transpacific_ tends to turn my stomach -- probably partly out of a sort of
morbid fascination with how ugly, vulgar, money-obsessed, and sexist Asians
can be, and partly because it's the only damn magazine out there targeted
at the Asian market.  Yeah, that's me, Mr. Captive Market.

This issue wasn't as bad as some of the past issues, although I'm not sure
it was worth the $5.95 I paid for it.

They must be raking in the advertising bucks though -- just flipping
through, they've got BMW, Martell Cognac, Bally Shoes, American Airlines,
Crown Royal, Audi, Wild Turkey, Sumitomo Bank, Chivas Regal, and British &
Japanese cigarettes.  I guess Asians like to buy a lot of liquor -- kind of
feels like reading an in-flight airline magazine.

All of the writers seemed to have European names: David Flak, Andrew
Leonard, Melinda Harper, James Kent.

To me, the most interesting story was about a Japanese man who was a sort
of host/pimp/professional party thrower for some unnamed Japanese
electronics firm -- he basically throws parties with a lot of pretty,
young, white, and probably blond girls for the Japanese company in Malibu.
If any of you read _Rising_Sun_, this was just like _Rising_Sun_ in real
life -- extremely, unthinkably rich Japanese businessmen running around
treating America like a third world country.  $4000/night call girls, $2000
door prizes, great sushi and sake, $10,000 parties every few nights, and
white girls galore, acting like a bunch of squealing little pretty
third-world bar girls being bowled over by their Japanese sugar daddies.

Kind of a flip/flop image, but one which is making more and more sense to
me, and one which I am sure we will be seeing a bunch more of in the
future.  The author of the story, Melinda Harper, attended one of the
parties -- and most of the girls at the parties are _not_ "professionals",
but rather just normal girls, who aren't paid at all.  The author won $2000
for a "karaoke contest", and she was really impressed by a Watanabe-san,
who was one of the guests at the party, although she says that she didn't
end up going home with him, although some of the other girls did drive off
into the sunset with their Japanese amours.

I didn't know how to feel after I read the article -- on the one hand, it
was kind of a horrible feeling that America has sunk to the level where
others can come here and treat us like some third-world country, but on the
other hand, I felt a kind of (very immature) glee at the standard
stereotype being turned on its head -- Great White Hunter plows his way
through some poor, third-world, Oriental floozies, NOT -- Japanese
businessmen plow their way through some tipsy, blond little California
girls.

There were a few travel-magazine-like articles about Taiwan and Korea.  One
article about Keiko Matsui, the Japanese jazz musician who was on the cover
(and way over made-up).  A fashion article with some _very_ expensive
clothes (Bally of Switzerland and Armani) being modeled by: an extremely
handsome Chinese or Japanese American male model, a very pretty Chinese
American female model, and a kind of chipmunk-cheeked, but pretty blond
female model -- everyone spent a lot of time lounging around in their
underwear or shirtless.  I'm not sure what the idea is -- gorgeous Asian
guy with one of each?  Hmmmm ....

There was an article about a very vulgar woman running some magazine down
in Orange County, and we are treated to all of the lurid details of her
past lovers/husbands/business partners, plus three rather off-the-wall
pictures of her post-middle-aged self vamping it up in skimpy tacky clothes
like the chutzpah-exuding, Southern California, nouveau riche, vulgar,
vulgar, vulgar woman she came off as.

There were two articles about businessmen working with traditional Chinese
herbal medicine -- one of them was a Stanford University doctor with a
company doing Western-style analysis of the effectiveness of those herbs,
and one was a multi-level marketing guy like Amway (kind of sleazy) with a
company called "Sunrider".  The title of the article about the Stanford guy
was "Drug Lord" -- really bad taste, guys.  They had an additional interior
decorating article about the house of the Amway guy, who looks like he's
_really_ rich.

Reading about the "Sunrider" guy gave me mixed feelings too.  Here's this
guy, ripping off poor, deluded people who go crazy and believe in him like
he's some sort of prophet or something.  Shades of Tom Vu.  But on the
other hand, my immature side got a hold of me, and just made me think --
jeez, if he's going to rip off a bunch of stupid people (mostly white) who
actually are desperate enough to believe him, then more power to him.  I'm
kind of a Tom Vu fan now, although I heard that they pulled him from the
stations he was doing his show on.

Reading _Transpacific_ was sort of like reading a very vulgar (jeez, how
many times have I used that adjective in this article already) magazine
version of Horatio Alger stories for Asians.  How to get rich, How to act
like a nouveau riche idiot, and How to be vulgar and offend others.  Trash,
but the only thing we've got.  It isn't about Asian-Americans in
particular, and it's more of a travel magazine / biography of rich Asian
businessmen/women magazine / fashion magazine than an Asian-American
magazine.  There was a good article by a Japanese woman married to an
American man and living in the States about her experiences as a Japanese
living in America, rejected by Japanese Americans, Japanese, and White
Americans.

Is "A." magazing actually off the ground now?

-Andy

PS: Any of you reading this in the building should feel free to come down
and borrow it -- I wouldn't want you to go out and spend your own $5.95 for
it.