There are schools and academies to train musicians, singers, dancers, even models to succeed in the entertainment industry, so why not a prep school that trains boys to become the next superstar kung fu action hero:

They may not kick like Bruce Lee, pack a Jet Li punch , or even act like Jackie Chan. But for 18 teenage boys living at the Heng Xing Ying Shi Kung Fu Acting School, becoming a kung fu star is their dream.

Their largely poor, rural families are staking much on that dream – sending the boys off to this bare-bones, but pricey, school run by Master Guo Shao Heng. They hope that the master – a prizewinning fighter in his teens who has been kicking and punching his way through movie sets for 12 years as a movie-fight choreographer – can help them hone their fight-acting skills enough to break into kung fu films. . . .

On referrals from local kung fu teachers, rural families ship their sons off to Beijing and pay up to $1,000 a year for a rigorous three-year program of early morning and afternoon training six days a week.

I suppose this is another example of how traditional Chinese culture and American-style entertainment culture and capitalism is coming together in China. There’s certainly nothing wrong with having big dreams and trying to improve your life. But that is certainly a lot of money for poor rural families to spend on the faint hope that their son will become the next Bruce Lee.

I normally like to promote most forms of Asian and Asian American culture, but sometimes I also have to be realistic, especially when it comes to things that are healthy or unhealthy. Case in point: as Wired News reports, a new study confirms that many of us have already known: [Americanized] Chinese food can be rather unhealthy for you:

A plate of General Tso’s chicken, for example, is loaded with about 40 percent more sodium and more than half the calories an average adult needs for an entire day. The battered, fried chicken dish with vegetables has 1,300 calories, 3,200 milligrams of sodium and 11 grams of saturated fat. That’s before the rice (200 calories a cup). And after the egg rolls (200 calories and 400 milligrams of sodium).

“I don’t want to put all the blame on Chinese food,” said Bonnie Liebman [Center for Science in the Public Interest]. “Across the board, American restaurants need to cut back on calories and salt, and in the meantime, people should think of each meal as not one, but two, and bring home half for tomorrow,” Liebman said. . . . In some ways, Liebman said, Italian and Mexican restaurants are worse for your health, because their food is higher in saturated fat, which can increase the risk of heart disease.

Chinese food . . . does offer vegetable-rich dishes and the kind of fat that’s not bad for the heart. However, the veggies aren’t off the hook. A plate of stir-fried greens has 900 calories and 2,200 milligrams of sodium. And eggplant in garlic sauce has 1,000 calories and 2,000 milligrams of sodium. . . .

It offers several tips for making a meal healthier: Look for dishes that feature vegetables instead of meat or noodles. Ask for extra broccoli, snow peas or other veggies. Steer clear of deep-fried meat, seafood or tofu. Order it stir-fried or braised. Hold the sauce, and eat with a fork or chopsticks to leave more sauce behind. Avoid salt, which means steering clear of the duck sauce, hot mustard, hoisin sauce and soy sauce. Share your meal or take half home for later. Ask for brown rice instead of white rice.

Most people -- even Asian Americans -- shouldn’t be shocked to learn that many of the dishes in Chinese restaurants and takeout joints can be unhealthy. So with everything else, enjoy it in moderation. Chinese food is great for an occasional meal, but as with the vast majority of fast food or restaurant food, you definitely should not make it an everyday part of your life. And by Chinese food, I mean Americanized Chinese restaurant food.

Here’s another suggestion: try Vietnamese food -- it tends to be lighter and uses less frying and sauces. In fact, many of my friends have told me after they tried Vietnamese food for the first time that they would never eat Chinese food again. Sorry, General Tso!

It should be no surprise by now that Chinese language classes are becoming increasingly popular among students in the U.S. After all, China is emerging as a global superpower and American parents are always looking for something that will give their children an advantage in the global workforce. But as the Christian Science Monitor reports, the problem is that there’s a shortage of Chinese language teachers:

Enrollment has soared, going from 5,000 primary and secondary school students in 2000 to estimates as high as 50,000 today, according to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. When the College Board surveyed schools in 2004 about their interest in a Chinese advanced-placement test, 2,400 schools expressed interest – but many also said they couldn’t find a teacher to start a program. . . .

To seed Chinese programs here, school districts are using guest-worker visas to bring over teachers from China and Taiwan. Another 34 schools this January received teachers from China through a new program set up by the College Board and Hanban, a Chinese government organization. Participating schools pay about $3,500 and agree to provide housing and local transportation to the teacher for two years, with the option to extend the contract for one more year. By 2009, the program hopes to bring as many as 250 teachers to the US. . . .

Several factors keep the Chinese-American community from playing a bigger role in bridging the cultural gap. . . . Many, especially in the San Francisco area, come from families who either speak Cantonese, an entirely different Chinese dialect, or an imperfect version of Mandarin. Meanwhile, more recent immigrants have high aspirations that lead them to dissuade their children from teaching . . . as incomes from private- sector jobs eclipsed teacher pay.

Who would have guessed that people fluent in Chinese are in big demand now? Until recently and still true in many ways today, people speaking Chinese were frowned upon, marginalized, or ridiculed. In fact a recent hate crime, where a Filipino high school student was mistaken for Chinese and beat up on a bus while the bus driver did nothing to intervene, shows the extent to which hostility still exists against the Chinese in the U.S.

While I generally applaud the fact that so many Americans are now apparently eager to learn Chinese, I wonder how long this will last. In other words, how long will it take for China’s economic, political, or perhaps military competition with the U.S. lead to increased tensions between the two countries -- tensions that would inevitably spill over onto Chinese Americans?

My point is, learning the Chinese language is one thing -- learning and respecting Chinese culture and society is something else. Americans seem eager to do the former -- are they also willing to also do the latter?

A reader alerted me to an essay contest for high school students in the Washington DC metropolitan area: the NBC affiliate station is sponsoring an Asian Pacific American Heritage Month essay contest. The deadline for submissions is Monday, April 9 and the winner will receive up to $1,500 towards his/her college tuition. Hey, you can’t win if you don’t enter, right?

As my article on Religion, Faith, & Spirituality describes, religion -- in its many forms -- is a very important part of many Asian American lives and communities. Not only does religion give someone a sense of a higher purpose and understanding, but religious organizations can serve many important material and emotional functions for its members. In that context, as the Los Angeles Times reports, it might be a cause of worry to hear that many Asian American churches face a shortage of new, young clergy:

Asian American churches are going through a “crisis of leadership” because seminaries are not preparing a new generation of pastors to work in multi-generational and multicultural settings, Asian American Christian leaders say. The problem, the leaders say, affects churches throughout the country but is particularly pronounced in California.

At a time when Christian immigrants from Asia and Asian converts in the United States are fueling what a study calls “the most dynamic changes in American Christianity,” few U.S. seminaries offer courses designed to prepare pastoral leaders for the linguistic and cultural needs of Asian American congregations. . . .

Pastors, seminary professors and lay leaders said at the session and in later interviews that generational schisms in Asian American churches are causing clergy attrition and turnover among pastors born or reared in the United States. Some young pastors experience so much frustration that they start their own English-speaking, pan-Asian churches. Others become so disillusioned that they leave the ministry, experts said.

As an example of the kind of generational differences among Asian American clergy that can lead to conflict, the article describes that many Asian immigrants are drawn to churches as a way to demonstrate or show off the own personal prosperity or status that are normally denied to them in mainstream American society. However, many U.S.-born Asian American clergy become disillusioned with this emphasis on material success and strict hierarchical structures.

In other words, the generation gap is real and is likely to have real consequences in the religious life of many Asian Americans in years to come. If this shortage of U.S.-born Asian American clergy continues, we may end up seeing Asian Americans segmented into separate religious communities -- one pan-Asian or largely integrated one where most U.S.-born Asian Americans attend, and one Asian-language one mostly for immigrants.

I’m assuming that not too many of you have heard of Andrea Jung. No, she’s not some up-and-coming actress or singer. Rather, she occupies a much more potentially powerful position as the only Asian American woman CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation, in this case Avon Cosmetics. As BusinessWeek magazine reports, she and her company have had some ups and downs lately but seem to be back on the upswing:

At the height of Jung’s problems, in December, 2005, management guru Ram Charan gave her a piece of pivotal advice. He advised Jung to go home that Friday night and imagine she had been fired. Then, he said, return Monday morning with the mindset of someone brought in from the outside. “If you can be that objective and blend in your institutional knowledge and relationships, you’re going to have an advantage,” he told her. . . .

Jung’s No. 1 role continues to be communicating the company’s new strategy. In the weeks leading up to and just after the February analysts’ gathering, Jung visited Bangkok, Hong Kong, London, São Paulo, Shanghai, and Warsaw. All that travel comes at a sacrifice. Jung has a daughter who will graduate from high school this spring and a son who is 9.

She says she has completely re- prioritized her life in the past two years, skipping business dinners and formal evening affairs in order to be sure she sees them when she’s in New York. But she also tells her children that she loves the company and the work, even if it has been grueling in recent months. “I think it’s important they know that,” she says. “Otherwise why would you do this?”

To be honest, I really don’t know anything personally about her and how important she considers her identity as a woman and/or as an Asian American. Nonetheless, but I think it’s important to know that there are examples of Asian American success in the corporate world out there, especially in her case as not just Asian American, but also as a woman. As such, whether she thinks about it or not, she potentially wields a lot of power and influence over not just people in her industry but Asian Americans -- particular women -- who see her as a role model.

I hope she does recognize her status and position in this regard and can serve as a positive force to create more opportunities for Asian Americans to follow her path and break through the glass ceiling into the ranks of corporate executives.

You may know that Saigon (aka ‘Ho Chi Minh City’) is Viet Nam’s biggest city and its commercial center. Like many cities in Asia, it is undergoing tremendous development and expansion. As the Christian Science Monitor reports, the rapid pace of growth has many worried that the city will lose its traditional charm and character:

Glass and steel buildings are already sprouting across the city and by 2009, a 68-story skyscraper, designed to invoke the lotus flower and the ao dai worn by Vietnamese women, promises to be this city’s Sears Tower. But in a city struggling to update its creaking infrastructure and keep its historical core intact, critics say the breakneck speed of expansion could spell a slow death for the unique character of a city once known as the Pearl of the Orient.

Government planners say they want to maintain the essence of the graceful colonial city laid out by French architects in the 19th century. So far, 108 historic buildings have been listed for preservation, and plans are afoot to build a new financial district apart from the old city to satisfy demand for office space. . . . This leaves many wondering which vision of the future will triumph: a planned urban renewal or an unchecked boom that turns Ho Chi Minh City into another sprawling Asian metropolis.

Economic growth in Saigon is inevitable, as long as the Vietnamese government follows its current path of state-controlled capitalism. So the question becomes, will Saigon turn into another Shenzhen, Bangkok, Manila, Taipei, etc., or will it somehow manage to retain its traditional charm? The article does mention decentralization as a potential solution -- building outward into Saigon’s suburbs to relieve traffic and congestion inside the city.

However it turns out, however Saigon looks in the next 20 or so years, I think the more important question is, will Saigon also follow the lead of the other Asian metropolises and incur a growing gap between the urban rich and the poor. Will the expansion of capitalism also result in growing economic and social inequality in Viet Nam? I think that’s the larger question that Viet Nam’s leaders need to worry more about.

In states such as California where there are large numbers of both Latinos and Asian Americans, it is inevitable that these two groups are going to have more and closer interactions with each other. The results of such interactions can be positive or they can be negative. As New American Media reports, recent interactions between Latinos and Koreans in the Los Angeles area unfortunately seem to be fraught with more negativity than positivity:

In clubs, schools and the work place Koreans and Latinos are increasingly sharing the same spaces, and yet there is little interaction between them. One public high school teacher here noted that his Korean and Latino students have “learned from their relatives to mutually ignore each other.”

As the two communities continue to grow they are becoming more dependent economically on one another. In major cities across the U.S. it is now common to find Korean-owned establishments employing predominantly Latino workers. While this opens opportunities for cultural exchange it also often leads to serious, sometimes violent, misunderstandings. . . .

Tensions between the two groups have been growing for several years. There has been a recent spike in court cases involving Korean business owners and their Latino employees . According to the New York-based National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, Latino immigrant workers filed a lawsuit against the Food Bazaar, a Korean supermarket chain for $1.5 million in unpaid wages. . . .

One story that caught the attention of both communities was the killing of a Korean man in late January by his Latino employee after his boss apparently criticized him for not working hard enough. The incident raised fears among Koreans, who are concerned over a repeat of the deadly Los Angeles riots of 1992, in which African Americans, angered by perceived racism from Korean storeowners, burned and looted Korea- owned establishments. This time, they say any riots that break out could be between Koreans and Latinos.

It is indeed a shame that two groups of people who share many historical and cultural elements in common don’t take the time to learn more about each other and instead, rely on stereotypes and eventually get sucked into the institutional mechanisms of racism and end up taking their frustrations out on each other.

As the article mentioned, there are indeed similarities with the kinds of tensions that existed between Blacks and Koreans back in the early 1990s that helped to spark the Los Angeles Riots in 1992. However, I am optimistic that things will not get that bad this time around because unlike the situation that existed in 1992, there are now many community organizations -- particular ones that serve the Korean population -- that have the opportunity to take proactive action to lessen tensions and promote more understanding.

The other thing that I hope is different nowadays is that hopefully the political leaders of Los Angeles will also take proactive steps to facilitate dialog between the Latino and Korean communities before such negative incidents and tensions get out of hand. In other words, hopefully all sides involved will have learned their lessons from 1992.