#i know some Chinese Indonesian families use their Chinese names at home in private but my fam didn't even have that tbh

[jesncin]

so... at what point does your lois officially start using her last name liando pubically, or does she still use her step-dad's last name except in private? just curious.

I think narratively it makes sense for Lois to eventually reclaim her surname publicly, and as Sam Lane becomes more villainous, she would grow to resent his name and what it represents. I just don't know when that would be! Since it'd be a big decision that affects her reputation. Lois' family would use the Liando surname in private, but especially after Ella marries Sam Lane, they don't use the surname anymore.

[theresabookforthat]

Friday Reads: Asian American Rom Coms

In the mood for some light-hearted, yet big-hearted escape this weekend? We are playing matchmaker! Look no further than these super popular new and bestselling Asian American romantic comedies for adult and young adult readers: 

 DIAL A FOR AUNTIES by Jesse Q. Sutanto

A hilariously quirky novel that is equal parts murder mystery, rom-com, and a celebration of mothers and daughters as well as a deep dive into Chinese-Indonesian culture set in Southern California, by debut author Jesse Q Sutanto.

CRAZY RICH ASIANS by Kevin Kwan

The basis for the hit movie!

When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details. One, that his childhood home looks like a palace; two, that he grew up riding in more private planes than cars; and three, that he just happens to be the country’s most eligible bachelor. On Nick’s arm, Rachel may as well have a target on her back the second she steps off the plane, and soon, her relaxed vacation turns into an obstacle course of old money, new money, nosy relatives, and scheming social climbers. 

THE KISS QUOTIENT by Helen Hoang

Stella Lane thinks math is the only thing that unites the universe. She comes up with algorithms to predict customer purchases—a job that has given her more money than she knows what to do with, and much less experience in the dating department than the average thirty-year-old. It doesn’t help that Stella has Asperger’s and French kissing reminds her of a shark getting its teeth cleaned by pilot fish. Her conclusion: she needs lots of practice—with a professional. Which is why she hires escort Michael Phan. The Vietnamese and Swedish stunner can’t afford to turn down Stella’s offer, and agrees to help her check off all the boxes on her lesson plan—from foreplay to more-than-missionary position…

LAST TANG STANDING by Lauren Ho

At thirty-three, Andrea Tang is living the dream: She has a successful career as a lawyer, a posh condo, and a clutch of fun-loving friends who are always in the know about Singapore’s hottest clubs. And if she’s about to become the lone unmarried member of her generation in the Tang clan—a disappointment her meddling Chinese-Malaysian family won’t let her forget—well, she doesn’t need a man to complete her. Yet when a chance encounter with charming, wealthy entrepreneur Eric Deng offers her a glimpse of an exciting, limitless future, Andrea decides to give Mr. Right-for-her-family a chance.

 THE DATING PLAN by Sara Desai

Daisy Patel is a software engineer in San Francisco who understands lists and logic better than bosses and boyfriends. Ever the obedient daughter, she always follows the rules, but the one thing she can’t give her family is the marriage they expect. With few options left to her, and desperate to escape a parade of unwanted suitors, she asks her childhood crush to be her decoy fiancé. Without rules, these fake fiancés might accidentally fall for each other in this romantic comedy by the author of The Marriage Game.

 FOR YOUNG ADULTS

 FRANKLY IN LOVE by David Yoon

An Asian Pacific American Librarians Association Honor Book

Two friends. One fake dating scheme. What could possibly go wrong?

Frank Li has two names. There’s Frank Li, his American name. Then there’s Sung-Min Li, his Korean name. No one uses his Korean name, not even his parents. Frank barely speaks any Korean. He was born and raised in Southern California. Even so, his parents still expect him to end up with a nice Korean girl—which is a problem, since Frank is finally dating the girl of his dreams: Brit Means. Brit, who is funny and nerdy just like him. Brit, who makes him laugh like no one else. Brit…who is white. In his moving debut novel, David Yoon takes on the question of who am I? —with a result that is humorous, heartfelt, and ultimately unforgettable.

FROM LITTLE TOKYO, WITH LOVE by Sarah Kuhn

Celebrated author Sarah Kuhn reinvents the modern fairy tale in this intensely personal yet hilarious novel of a girl whose search for a storybook ending takes her to unexpected places in both her beloved LA neighborhood and her own guarded heart.

A TASTE FOR LOVE by Jennifer Yen

 To her friends, high school senior Liza Yang is nearly perfect. But to her mom, Liza is anything but. Compared to her older sister Jeannie, Liza is stubborn, rebellious, and worst of all, determined to push back against all of Mrs. Yang’s traditional values, especially when it comes to dating. For fans of Jenny Han, Jane Austen, and The Great British Baking Show, A Taste for Love, is a delicious rom com about first love, familial expectations, and making the perfect bao.

 For more on these and related titles (for kids and adults) visit the collection Asian American Rom Coms

[weeklyreviewer]

Japan’s Would-Be Silicon Valley Wants You

Masashi Tomita, who leads municipal efforts to attract tech startups to Fukuoka, Japan, is laugh-out-loud tipsy. The laughter is a clue, but so is the empty mug of Mega Jim Beam Highball, his third. We leave the bar and roam the streets for shime, or drunk food, hunkering our hankering at a solo yaki-ramen cart in the posh Tenjin district. Clinking glasses of plum liquor, I ask what I think is a cheery question: “Why can’t all of Japan be this fun?” He looks crestfallen, not insulted but embarrassed.

The Japanese call it nazonazo, a mystery upon a mystery, a riddle: Why is Japan — a 130-million-strong G7 nation with the world’s third-largest nominal GDP, bullet trains, robotics, a space program, and tech renown — such a dud in the startup world?

For all its business and engineering prowess, Japan has just one unicorn, or privately-owned, venture-backed tech company worth at least $1 billion, according to CB Insights. For the record, that company is artificial intelligence startup Preferred Networks.

But despite behemoth native power players including Honda, Mitsubishi, Nintendo, SoftBank, Sony, and Toyota, its corporate salaryman circles are full of squares, by design. Nearly every member of the Japanese workforce is a de facto senior vice president of rules and regulations. Japan’s national sport is protocol. In June, the country’s largest initial public offering of the year raised ¥33.8 billion ($315 million) and shares soared 21% on the first day of trading. What was all the fuss? It was Sansan, a tedious business card management app and sales-lead generator.

But what if the lack of Silicon Valley-style disruption is a cultural asset? Consider the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which broken pottery is repaired by filling the hibi, or cracks, with gold. What if “move fast and break things” — the early Facebook motto adopted by brogrammers everywhere — isn’t lost in translation as much as it’s discarded in translation? Why break when you can beautify?

Cue the startup incubator

Cue Fukuoka Growth Next, the country’s largest startup accelerator, which debuted in 2017, refurbished this May, and in August launches a nearly half-billion yen internal venture capital fund, FGN ABBALab, that will double investment in the next year. The fund is bankrolled in part by Mistletoe, owned by Taizo Son, the brother of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son.

Backed by 22 companies, including Fujitsu, Ricoh, and Seiko, FGN joins other global tech hubs in the hopes of becoming its nation’s, um, Silicon Hibi. On site, in a converted three-story elementary school built in 1929, there are no foosball tables or vintage arcade games like in Silicon Valley. The whimsy comes from within.

Fukuoka Growth Next startup accelerator in Fukuoka, Japan.

“This city has been accepting different cultures for 2,000 years. And 100 years ago Toyota was a concept of entrepreneurial spirit—it is within us,” says Tomita. “We got organized after the war, but uniform—same, same, same—salarymen. It’s time to take our neckties off.”

Fukuoka, on the west coast of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost big island — a five-hour bullet train ride from Tokyo — is preternaturally suited to the task. Amid Japan’s infamously aging population, Fukuoka’s 1.6 million residents comprise the nation’s youngest city. That includes 80,000 students across 19 universities (a 120-member student club at Kyushu University runs an office at FGN).

The exquisitely Instagrammable Kawachi Wisteria Garden nearby and Nokonoshima Flower Island, surf town of Itoshima, and wine country across Kyushu, famed for its hot spring spa towns, give Fukuoka a distinctly California vibe — as does its diversity.

Large populations of American, Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Indonesian, Korean, Nepalese, Portuguese, Thai, and Vietnamese immigrants were bolstered by relaxed labor laws in March. The Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, which has collections from 22 countries, bills itself as “the only museum in the world that systematically collects and exhibits Asian modern and contemporary art.”

The port town is the cruise ship capital of Japan, not including the ferries that jet to and from nearby Busan, in South Korea. And Seoul, Shanghai, and Tokyo are just two hours away by plane.

The world is at its fingertips. The city’s unofficial mantra is samiyasui (easy living).

The force behind the tech push

Fukuoka, Japan

Its youngest-ever mayor, Soichiro Takashima, a television news anchor elected in 2010 at 36, returned from a trip to Seattle intent on remaking Fukuoka in its image. In 2014, he convinced the federal government to declare Fukuoka a National Strategic Special Zone. FGN opened three years later, in tandem with a startup visa specifically designed to lure foreign entrepreneurs. The mayor still drops into FGN almost weekly.

Future prospects are buoyed by Fukuoka Smart East, a 124-acre smart city campus in Hakozaki district that will be a playground (and showroom) for Internet-of-things prototypes and hydrogen power, with its own accelerator division within FGN. In June, a smart city incubation program launched. But that kind of thinking has already begun: in January, Line, Japan’s largest social network — with 78 million users — tested a digital wallet in Fukuoka.

Yuichiro Uchida, FGN’s executive director, throws his arms into a human emoticon: ¯(ツ)/¯. “There’s just less pressure here,” he says. “That leaves more room for creativity and inspiration.” His bemused grin radiates “duh.” He continues: “Tokyo aims for the U.S. or London for status. But our proximity to Asia — Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore — is our strength. I’d rather be big in Asia than big in New York or San Francisco.”

To keep stress low, FGN offers free consultations to startups on, say, accounting, copyright, or intellectual property (what Tomita calls “startup defense”). Uchida talks about the smart city project as a “grand vision,” a physical, infrastructural white paper.

When we meet, Uchida is dressed down in a t-shirt. A rugby star in school, he’s now 43, but retains a boyish breeziness. In contrast, his entrepreneurial radar is mature and specific: the drone startups of Bordeaux and its Darwin station, the design scene in Copenhagen, tax structures in Singapore, and the European Union’s de facto IT bureau in Tallinn, Estonia. I ask him what’s better than creating — what is the entrepreneurial equivalent of omotenashi, Japan’s hyper-hospitality? — and his answer is kyoso: co-creating.

His is a train of thought born of wabisabi, the Japanese notion that imperfection is often better than perfection. As Tomita puts it: “I value diversity. You can’t embrace diversity and expect perfection.”

At its debut, FGN’s initial goal was for its tenants to raise ¥500 million ($4.6 million) by December 2018, but they instead raised ¥8.2 billion ($75.9 million). Amid the Japanese economy’s Abenomics, the fiscal reforms of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, FGN offers a radical oasis of wabisabinomics. As opposed to existing for the sake of getting on Google’s radar (and the acquisition bounty that comes with it) FGN’s startups seem genuinely, refreshingly focused on their users in a way that prioritizes purpose and risk over buzz and security, harkening to the era when Silicon Valley was defined more by garage-built moxie than IPO bluster.

Sakiko Taniguchi developed Nyans, a social network for cat lovers, at FGN. “There’s no word for salarywoman but there doesn’t need to be when you’re family. Here I have drinks with the mayor,” she says. “In Tokyo, I can’t think of anything other than work. I’m more than that. My company would be possible in Tokyo — I expanded there in February — but there I wouldn’t be able to run the company the way I want. Fukuoka gives me what I want and how I want it.”

Early success

She hopes to follow FGN’s successful alumni: Alterbooth, a cloud integrator, raised ¥100M ($922K) in June; Authentic Japan, an SOS app that sends rescue drones to users, became mandatory at a major ski resort in April; and Skydisc, an air quality startup with both agricultural and home/office applications, was called a “future unicorn” by Nikkei news service. In all, FGN’s 293 total companies, 21 are established players like local banks and Yahoo, while the remaining 272 startups have pulled in $82 million and lured entrepreneurs from nine countries.

FGN member Kenji Umeki frequents FGN’s ironically named bar, Awa (Bubble), a satellite of a spot popular among techies in Tokyo’s Roppongi district. Umeki named his human resources startup, You Make It, as a pun on his name. His users include Bangladeshi, Chinese, and Vietnamese workers. “Honestly, I have a Vietnamese friend and I just wanted to help him,” he says. “I want that to be a good enough reason for a business proposal.”

Strolling the bank of the curly Nakagawa River, a ¥1-a-day shared-economy umbrella in his hand, Kazuya Shidahara, FGN’s head of engineering events, sits me down with some FGN leaders among Fukuoka’s other great startups: the yatai, the here-and-gone nightly food carts selling ramen, mentaiko, and yakitori. I ask the group what would happen if one of the ramen stands were so successful that it opened locations all over the world like McDonalds or Starbucks. “Like Gong Cha?” asks Shidahara, referring to the Taiwanese bubble tea chain. “Do you know people wait up to three hours there? For what? A tea and an Instagram upload? It’s a trap, a prison. Maybe that’s why they’re called chains.” His words are scalability heresy, but they also call out a Silicon Valley contradiction: its dueling ambitions of ubiquity and unique experience.

Perhaps FGN’s roundabout unorthodoxy can solve a riddle that has been plaguing San Francisco, too — especially the toxic tumult at Facebook, Google, and Uber — while paradoxically paying tribute to an ancient Japanese tradition: Fukuoka is primed to be a beacon of entrepreneurial bushido, the samurai code, helping restore honor and morality to tech (cough, Theranos, that once-celebrated Silicon Valley blood-testing startup that ultimately imploded). Now would be a good time to practice bowing.

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