People are still trickling into the lot in front of the Arcata Playhouse, thickening the crowd already encircling the low stage, where Marylyn Paik-Nicely, a “founding mother” of Humboldt Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity (HAPI), stands in pink sneakers and a purple T-shirt commemorating this, the first Obon festival in Humboldt County, a cell […]
Asian American
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Heading for Charlie Moon Way
This summer during the Eureka Street Art Festival, artist Dave Young Kim painted a mural depicting a Mandarin duck and Ben Chin, the first Chinese American to open a business in Eureka in 1955, 70 years after the mass expulsion of Chinese people from the town. That mural, emblazoned with the word “hometown,” stands in […]
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‘Real People’: Sunday’s Love Over Hate Vigil
The sun belied the chill on Sunday afternoon in the lot of the Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Bayside, some 200 people came for a walking meditation and vigil for victims of the March 16 shooting in Atlanta that targeted Asian women and took the lives of eight people. In front of the closed hall, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
KEET’s ‘Asian Americans’ Panel Kicks off Series
Nobody knows what day it is anymore but it’s definitely May, and that means Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. KEET is kicking off a series of programming about the history and cultural impact of Asians and Pacific Islanders with an Ovee preview screening and panel discussion this Sunday, May 10 at 4 p.m. (free). […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Rice Sacks and Blessings
Every April the Humboldt Grange fills with music, prayer, the chanting of Buddhist monks and Lao food — tables laden with aluminum trays of fried fish, spring rolls, rice cakes and pungent salads — some of which families bring up in silver chalices as New Year’s offerings to their ancestors. But this year, under the […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Swing Time Travel: Photos and Video from the Taiko Swingposium
Last weekend, the San Jose Taiko Swingposium Immersive Theater Experience’s On the Road show transformed the Bayside Community Hall into a World War II-era dance hall in a Japanese-American incarceration camp. While under armed guard and having lost their homes, possessions and rights as Americans, those in the camps played music and held dances like these […]
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Taiko Swings up to Humboldt
Imagine a 1940s dance hall full of swing dancers sporting pin curls and pompadours moving to the big band sound of saxophones, trumpets and trombones. Now imagine the precision of traditional Japanese taiko drumming leading the beat and the dance taking place in the mess hall of a World War II Japanese American internment camp. […]
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Lao New Year
Just after 9 in the morning on April 21 in the Humboldt Grange parking lot, a handful of people are unloading covered foil trays from cars as a low droning of voices drifts from the sound system inside. While the food is spirited to the kitchen, one of a trio of Buddhist monks on stage, […]