With SJSU Homecoming soon upon us, the venerable Herb Caen Rinpoche revisited his alma mater for two author events last week: a Harvard Buddhist scholar and a former Asian pin-up model.
Both events allowed the columnist to harmonize the polarities of the San Jose condition.
First of all, throughout the matrix of alter egos that have surfaced to narrate this column over the last 20 years, Herb Caen Rinpoche was always my favorite. Taking his nom de plume from the legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist, but attaching the Tibetan Buddhist honorific, he specialized in fusing the opposites of east and west, luxury and gutter, intimacy and distance, and especially last week, the sacred with the profane.
We begin with the legendary B. R. Ambedkar, the godfather of India’s constitution and the subject of a lecture last week by Dr. Christopher Queen from Harvard. Hosted by SJSU’s Humanities 10 class, Queen gave a rousing presentation in the Student Union Theatre, a venue on the lower level of “Student Union East,” directly opposite the art building.
In the struggle for equal rights, Ambedkar should be as well known as Mahatma Gandhi. He produced a now-famous book, The Annihilation of Caste, based on an undelivered speech, and then when India emerged as a nation state, Ambedkar chaired meetings and helped draft the constitution.
Ambedkar was born a Hindu of the untouchable caste, but later ceremoniously converted to Buddhism and dedicated his life to social justice and the eradication of class-based prejudice. He taught social freedom, intellectual freedom, economic freedom and political freedom. Ambedkar also developed a long war of words with Gandhi, who, as a devout unwavering Hindu, refused to “annihilate” caste but ultimately maintain it to some degree.
Queen’s lecture was based on his own career’s worth of research into Ambedkar’s life. He even grafted the trinity “liberty, equality and fraternity” with the three jewels of Buddhism, expanding on Ambedkar’s philosophy.
Afterward, attendees continued the discussion outside the building, over hot apple cider and vegan sushi, right in the former sunken cement amphitheater space where I watched Rancid play in 1994.
The very next day, Kaila Yu, the Taiwanese American pin-up model who graced import car magazines 25 years ago, showed up to talk about her new memoir, Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty. The talk unfolded upstairs in Meeting Room 4A of the Student Union, not far from where U2 played in 1981.
Yu is now a jet-setting Instagram influencer and travel writer. Fetishized is a brutally honest, vulnerable and deeply personal memoir in essays, but also a subtle slaughter of the Asian fetishist creeps. Everybody knows one of those guys. Or maybe everybody. You know, the white dude with the long string of Asian ex-girlfriends who somehow claims it’s just a “preference,” not a racist sexual othering of Asian women.
But that’s only part of the book. After Yu’s modeling career, she became a MySpace celebrity and joined the all-Asian-American-female rock band Nylon Pink, while knowingly playing up the submissive Asian women stereotypes to sexualize herself and become famous—certainly, she writes, due to unmet needs from childhood. As a result, she tumbled into substance abuse and brutal body modifications before finally getting clean and sober in her later days. It’s an amazing journey of self-realization, one that will inspire many.
As if that wasn’t enough, the event was hosted by SJSU Professor Xiaojia Hou’s undergraduate History of China class. Students with no knowledge of the MySpace era were required to attend. After Yu’s talk about Asian women stereotypes and the fetishist creeps, to which many students in the room related, the instructor then joined the conversation. As a fierce woman who grew up in China, the professor said she never experienced the white American stereotypes of Asians. She talked back to her parents and started arguments with everyone about everything. Maybe this was the difference, she said with a laugh, between growing up in Asia, as opposed to being Asian American. Man, what a conversation.
These were just two of the amazing events at San Jose State last week, a great way to bring it all back home. Herb Caen Rinpoche was proud of his alma mater and came away reinvigorated. Hail Spartans, hail!
