Chinese Americans

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.

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.

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.

David Henry Hwang's new Broadway comedy, "Chinglish," makes bright, mischievous sport of the language barrier that separates an American businessman from the Chinese authorities who hold the keys to a vast new market. The idea for the play was inspired by Hwang's own visits to China, where he was forced to rely on translators. A few Mandarin courses in college along with some work with private tutors weren't enough to exempt the playwright, a first-generation Chinese American, from the farcical limbo of being lost in translation.

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.

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.