Struggles of Alzheimer’s caregivers + Arrests in Fresno Hmong shootings: Your AAPI newsletter

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Happy new year, y’all! It is Thursday, Jan. 2, and this is The Sacramento Bee’s AAPI weekly newsletter, brought to you by yours truly.

Here’s a recap on the stories I recently covered and issues I’m following:

UC Davis professor Oanh Meyer, who researches and helps with Alzheimer’s disease care, talks about how she, as a primary caregiver for her mother, understands the challenges, barriers and emotional burdens that come with that role — especially for newer immigrants — but are often ignored or dismissed.

According to a 2019 report by the Alzheimer’s Association, many current studies on dementia among Asian subgroups are unreliable and more studies are needed to draw significant conclusions about the prevalence of Alzheimer’s and other dementias in Asian and Pacific Islander subgroups.

In other news, six suspected gang members have been arrested in connection with a shooting that left four people of Hmong descent dead and six others injured at a Fresno backyard party, The Fresno Bee reports.

Fresno Police Chief Andy Hall announced the arrests during a Tuesday morning news conference, where he said the case was solved through the combined efforts of local, state and federal officials.

Highly skilled immigrants struggle to fill workforce gaps, which results in a loss of individual earnings and tax revenues of billions of dollars per year in California and other states, KQED News reports.

Don’t miss the NBC News report summing up Asian Americans in a decade, of the group gaining political influence, grassroot organizing, moving toward alternative media as well as a demand to be seen on screen and more studio investments in Asian American stories.

On more representation on screen and the latest sequel of the Star Wars film series, it reminds me of Vietnamese American actress Kelly Marie Tran, the first woman of color to have a leading role in a “Star Wars” film. Her essay, published by The New York Times in 2018, speaks out for the first time after she deleted her Instagram posts that year in response to online harassment she’s received since starring in the movie.

Bruce Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee, head of California-based Bruce Lee Enterprises, filed a case against the Real Kungfu Chinese food chain in a Shanghai court, Reuters reports, for using the late kungfu star’s image in its logo without permission. The food chain has been using the logo for 15 years.

A dispute over a racism accusation between writers of the Romance Writers of America group led to most of the board members resigning, The New York Times reports. Courtney Milan, a Chinese-American writer, accused another writer, Kathryn Lynn Davis, of using racist stereotypes, including the notion of submissive Chinese woman, in her novel, which could fuel higher rates of violence against women. Davis said her book was “historically accurate” and based on years of research.

According to a Los Angeles Times story about the Asian Hustle Network, a California-based Asian American business network on Facebook for young professionals and entrepreneurs across the globe, that aims to reach 1 million members.

Brace for more art exhibits in 2020: The opening of the new Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco will add 28,000 square feet of new space to feature more art from Asia, to debut with an installation by Japanese collaborative teamLab.

What better than spending time on books in the Californian winter? The illustrated memoir “The Best We Could Do” by Thi Bui is my pick of the week. Bui writes and draws about her family’s story, starting from how her parents fled from war-torn Vietnam during the Vietnam War in the 1970s, to them eventually fleeing the country as refugees to the United States and the trauma that entails. It is a moving journey of reconciliation, of understanding, of finding identity and the meaning of home. This NPR story details the brewing process behind Bui’s brainchild. Gentle notice: have tissue handy.

Finally: What do you want to read about on Sacramento or California’s AAPI population? Send your thoughts to me at tyu@sacbee.com.

That’s it for this week’s newsletter. Thank you for reading!

Theodora Yu covers Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in California for The Sacramento Bee. She is a member of Report for America’s 2019 corps of journalists.