Chinese American

Dreams of Joy A Novel Lisa See Random House: 354 pp., $26 With each new novel, Lisa See gets better and better. Each work is more tightly woven, richer with information, its characters more memorable than the last. In her previous novel, "Shanghai Girls" (2009), See gave us an unforgettable portrait of Shanghai, of its cosmopolitan ways and elegant atmosphere that made it a cultural center of Asia, and of two sisters thriving in that world of beauty and delicacy — until history intrudes and forces them to leave it all behind for an uncertain future far away in Los Angeles.

The laughter starts before the noodles even hit the ground. Frozen in mid-grasp, I watch a chopstick spin uncontrollably out of my hand, flinging droplets of sesame oil as it falls. "Would you like a fork?" a waiter asks, staring at the mess. "Mei guan xi," I tell him, everything's just fine. The saying goes that if you drop your chopsticks while eating, it will bring you bad luck. Well, I still don't know how to use chopsticks properly, which is almost worse than not knowing how to use chopsticks at all. Old habits die hard.

Him Mark Lai, an engineer by training and historian by avocation whose groundbreaking scholarship and treasure trove of archival documents guided generations of scholars to study the daily lives and struggles of Chinese Americans, died May 21 in San Francisco. He was 83. The cause was complications of cancer, according to his wife, Laura.

As Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping makes his way across the U.S. in a five-day tour, Chinese American community leaders in Southern California are putting the finishing touches on their high-profile welcome banquet. Many Chinese American business leaders, professors and residents have been trying to score a ticket to the invitation-only event Thursday night. "My phone has not stopped ringing," said Sue Zhang, president of the Roundtable of Chinese American Organizations and the head of the 15-person welcome committee formed to prepare the banquet.

The caller sounded as if he had just won the lottery. After years of trying, he had finally reached the disc jockey at his favorite radio station, KAZN-AM (1300). "I've been listening to your program for 10 years. This is the first time I got through," the caller said, adding that he was listening from work and that he and his buddies would love to hear the Mandarin oldie, "Do You Know I'm Waiting For You?" A few minutes later, DJ Steve Kuo played the romantic ballad. It sounded a little like something by the band Air Supply, except the singer was crooning in Chinese.

When City Administrator Edwin M. Lee became interim mayor of the City by the Bay, San Francisco got much more than just a low-key replacement for Gavin Newsom, who has taken his gelled hair and actress wife to Sacramento. Lee is the first Asian American mayor of this dense and diverse city, where Asians account for nearly a third of the population and the scars of history run deep. Lee's ascendance, activists say, is a milestone a long time coming. And he's not alone in the Bay Area.

Stocks in two Los Angeles banks that target the Chinese American market have surged in recent days to 52-week highs, but analysts speculated that the gains are unrelated. Cathay Bancorp Inc. (CATY), which has nearly $2 billion in assets, is up more than 20% over the last two days. The thinly traded stock closed Thursday at $53, up $2.63 in Nasdaq trading. Volume on Tuesday and Wednesday was more than 15 times the recent average.

Adversity and long odds meant nothing to Margaret Chung. In 1916, she surmounted both tradition and bigotry to become the nation's first American-born female physician of Chinese ancestry, practicing in Los Angeles and later San Francisco. Compared with such obstacles, the war against fascism and militarism was just one more challenge that Chung threw herself into.

The day after Gavin Newsom squeaked to victory in a runoff election here, the mayor-elect scheduled only one stop: the narrow streets of Chinatown. Shortly before his swearing in last month, Newsom went to thank the community that had helped hoist him into the city's power seat. "There is one reason I won a very close election," Newsom told 600 supporters in one of Chinatown's oldest banquet halls, after lion dancers and cymbals welcomed him.

I read with interest the article on Judge Donald A. McCartin (May 22). As a person of Chinese-American descent, I found his use of the term China man quite offensive. This term has never been an acceptable name for members of my race. While defense of people of Asian heritage has never been as widely accepted by the liberals for political correctness as the defense of other races who tend to vote in blocks, Asians do have feelings too. If Judge McCartin wishes his claim as a non-biased person to be believed, he should cease the use of the term China man. Asian or Chinese is more acceptable.

In 1949, Eugene Kinn Choy built his family a home in Silver Lake. Deftly set in a narrow hillside lot, it was praised as a model of modernism, photographed by Julius Shulman and its merits noted in national architecture magazines. And yet the house might not have been built at all, if not for Choy's ingenuity and resolve. When racial covenants had threatened to keep him out of the area, he went door to door, seeking neighbors' permission before he moved in. "Even after he got an OK to purchase the land, no mainstream bank would offer financing," says Steven Y. Wong, the curator at the Chinese American Museum.

Reporting from San Francisco -- Interim Mayor Ed Lee won a four-year term by a solid margin, a vote tally Wednesday showed, making him the first Chinese American elected to lead a city where a fourth of the voters are of Chinese descent. The results capped a bitter campaign in which a number of Lee's 15 opponents accused him of reneging on a promise not to run. More recently, criminal investigations of alleged money laundering and ballot tampering shadowed Lee's supporters. Lee strongly denounced the purported wrongdoing, and ultimately voters decided that the soft-spoken candidate, who campaigned on job creation and his 10-month record of collaborative governance, deserved a full term.

In the wake of new California legislation that outlaws the sale and possession of shark fins, some Chinese American food purveyors are objecting that the law unfairly deprives their customers of a centuries-old Asian delicacy, shark fin soup. "Now it's just one more thing Chinese people cannot find in America," said Thai Ong, manager of Monterey Park's Wing Hop Fung, a Chinese specialty store that carries dried shark fin. Dried shark fin, the soup's main ingredient, can sell for more than $2,000 a pound in California.

A bill to outlaw shark fin, the main ingredient in a traditional Chinese soup, now moves to the California Senate floor, where a vote is expected within the next few weeks. A bill to outlaw shark fin, the main ingredient in a traditional Chinese soup, cleared a key hurdle Thursday when it passed a state Senate committee. The bill, which would ban the sale, trade and possession of shark fins in the state, has been championed by conservation groups as a way to curb their harvest, a practice that has contributed to the sharp decline of shark populations worldwide.

I still remember the last time I ate shark's fin, in a grand, now-defunct Monterey Park seafood palace, more than 15 years ago. This restaurant had been proud of its pricey shark's-fin specialties, so much so that it showcased its finest specimens in glass cases, where they had the stark, ghostly presence of museum displays, although by this time some connoisseurs had moved on to the rarer, costlier pleasures of sun-dried abalone farmed in Japan....

A pair of shaggyhaired teenagers sauntered into the Chinatown Branch Library, one holding a basketball, the other, a boba tea. Librarian Shan Liang took note. "No drinks!" she admonished. Guiltily, the offender tossed his cup into a trash can. Liang, the library branch's manager, may have a sharp bark. But in truth, she was thrilled to see the teenagers and all the other people who came to the library Monday. For the last year, her branch and the rest of the Los Angeles Public Library system has been closed on Mondays.

That Gov. Pete Wilson made an excellent choice in naming Ming W. Chin to the California Supreme Court is confirmed by the praise for Chin from lawyers and jurists who rarely agree on anything. Thursday's appointment was hailed by retiring conservative Justice Armand Arabian, whose seat Chin will fill, as well as by liberal Justice Stanley Mosk and Gerald Uelmen, the law professor and criminal defense attorney. Few appointees in recent years have met such universal and immediate acclaim.

When Lucy Huang was a child, she scoffed at the idea that she was supposed to be stubborn and aggressive just because she was born in the Year of the Tiger. She hated that her first-generation Taiwanese American parents made her go to Chinese school on Saturdays when all of her mostly non-Chinese friends got to play. But this week, the 32-year-old commercial cookware executive is taking on the customs and rituals of the Chinese New Year with gusto.

An emotional battle over a traditional soup has split California's Chinese American community as environmental and animal welfare groups push the Legislature to ban the sale and possession of shark fins. The bill passed the Assembly last month, 65-8, but is running into trouble in the Senate. The fight has pitted influential Chinese American politicians against one another, some of whom are running for mayor of San Francisco. Chinese traders and restaurant owners have hired lobbyists to oppose a ban, and busloads of Chinatown residents have descended on the Capitol, saying that a ban would violate cultural custom.

The bar was Irish, the sport originally French, but the zeitgeist on this night in Beijing was all about China. "China has made it into the history books once again. We're going to take on the world and no one can stop us," exulted Lei Jianbo, seconds after the match point that made Li Na the first Chinese player to win one of tennis' Grand Slam singles tournaments. That the geopolitical implications went far beyond the bounce of the tennis ball was clear to Lei and his friends, well-dressed professionals in their 20s and 30s who had gathered Saturday evening at a Beijing bar called Paddy O'Shea's.