Saving Chinatown, Riverside

Efforts in Riverside, California, to preserve its historic Chinatown may get a boost if enough netizens vote by Thursday early afternoon to support those efforts in the This Place Matters Community Challenge offered by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

These grass-roots efforts, with the active support of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, are among 100 preservation projects seeking to win 3 cash awards.

For more information, you can check out this web site. Voting ends June 30, 2011 at 1:59 PM Pacific time. A link there allows one to vote after registering one's email and zip code and receiving a password. The Riverside Chinatown efforts are listed as: Chinese Historical Society of Southern California - Riverside, California Riverside Chinatown. As of this posting, the group is ranked 29 out of 100 unless more people decide to vote.

The local preservationists have formed a Save Our Chinatown Committee which is seeking to stop development above what has been partially uncovered as the remains of historic Chinatown, first founded in 1870, [CORRECTION: actually the second Chinatown, in 1885, after residents of the first Chinatown were forced out,] with its residents responsible for much of the citrus activity in the county. The Los Angeles Times recently profiled the struggle, including the activism of a UC Riverside librarian, Judy Lee.

A facebook site has also been set up: Save Riverside Chinatown.

Edgy City: Urban/Rural Space and Ho Chi Minh City

Link to audio of program: .
Update 21 February 2014:  Erik Harms has won the Association for Asian Studies' 2014 Harry J. Benda Prize for Saigon's Edge



As Ho Chi Minh City races to be Vietnam's most modern metropolis, some outlying areas are left behind. Yet they become interesting because they exhibit many of the tensions that face the developing country after decades of war, as Vietnam copes with being nominally Socialist but practically capitalist, and races to modernize itself, at the risk of leaving behind peasants in the largely rural country.

Erik Harms, who teaches Anthropology at Yale, has offered a revealing look at the social lives that intersect each other in the wake of this modernization race. Focusing on Hóc Môn, on the edge of Saigon, he writes like a journalist [I mean his writing is readable], revealing social lives as otherwise marginalized residents of this region on the Trans-Asia Highway are able to tell their stories through his new book, Saigon's Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City, now out from University of Minnesota Press.

Harms is interviewed by KUCI Subversity show host Daniel C. Tsang, in the first show of this 2011 summer online series, as Subversity takes a break from radio broadcasts for the summer. The interview is exclusively available online, and as podcasts, with a official posting date of Monday 20 June 2011 but the interview was taped earlier today, 17 June 2011 at KUCI's studios.

Interview with Harms by Yale University posted on YouTube:

Greg Louganis Speaks at UCI

Updated: Link to audio of program: .

Louganis in video feed

In an inspirational speech Olympic twice-gold medalist Greg Louganis, of Samoan/Swedish heritage, and a UCI drama alumnus, Friday 10 June 2011 addressed graduating seniors at UCI's Arts School graduation (the event also included graduates from the Physical Sciences).

Louganis, who was HIV-positive when he won the two golds in diving in the 1988 Olympics, said he is proof HIV/AIDS is no longer a "death sentence." He exhorted UCI's graduating students in the Arts and in Physical Sciences to be imaginative {"to explore your imagination") and have trust in fellow human beings, even though he himself was at times overly trusting of others ("I'd rather trust... than be cynical").

The UCI drama alumnus said this was his first graduation he ever attended.

On the last Subversity show of this quarter, we air an edited version of his talk in the first part of Subversity this evening, 13 June 2011, at 5-6 p.m. on KUCI, 88.9 FM in Orange County, California, and simulcast via kuci.org.

Subversity is taking a break this summer and expects to return with the KUCI fall season in late September.