Psychologist Dr. Gordon Nagayama Hall retired from academia a few years ago, but he's continuing to work to increase the percentage of AANHPIs who will seek help from mental health professionals. To this end, he is part of a team that has developed the Mind Boba problem-solving intervention app that is culturally adapted and created for Asian Americans! (Check out trifoia.com/mindboba on the Web, mind.boba on Instagram, and the Mind Boba FB page). Here's your chance to learn about this easily accessible new mental health tool before it launches.
In this year's last installment of the collaborative The Two Kens podcast series, Fong first updates Kemp on how his relationship is going with Doreen, his high school girlfriend from half a century ago, then coaxes Kemp to read his latest Substack essay entitled The Baby and the Bathwater: What Is the Baby?. The focus of Kemp's mental exercise is what's left after growing numbers of conservative Christians "deconstruct" their beliefs. Are there still solid reasons to believe in and worship God? This leads to Fong and Kemp wondering aloud about the power and importance of Jungian archetypes and mythic figures and stories, and whether this lens can or should be applied to the Christmas Nativity.
In 2022 Korean American Christian actor, writer, producer, and director Kenneth Chang teamed up with David Chan Lee to create the short horror film Refuse, in which a down and out Korean American Christian young man is fighting the demon of meth addiction, while his mother's KA church views him as a demon. You'll learn about how great horror films are able to depict not just the battle between good and evil, but spiritual battles between God and the devil.
My guest this episode is a proven leader who's a great example of the power of unconventional thinking. Jim Fong was an executive vice president and chief commercial officer for CTI Biopharma. This summer a Swedish pharmaceutical giant plunked down nearly $2 billion US dollars to acquire this startup, but as you're about to learn, almost no one in the industry predicted that this would happen. Jim and his team were given the near-impossible task of recruiting a salesforce of 100 to sell their blood-cancer treatment before it had received FDA approval while 80% of the market was already controlled by a huge pharmaceutical company. Jim and his team decided that they needed to look for people with the right attitude, not the right aptitude. He's the youngest of my two brothers, and I'm extremely proud of him and what he accomplished in the face of insurmountable odds.
UC Santa Barbara English Professor Dr. Yunte Huang recently published the final book in his "Rendezvous With American History" trilogy. Following the ones about the real and fictional detective Charlie Chan and the unbelievable one about the Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker, Huang has now researched and written a thoroughgoing book about Hollywood's first Asian American movie star Anna May Wong. How did the daughter of a laundryman in LA's Chinatown get bit by the acting bug? Have the rumors about her sexuality been confirmed? Why did she suddenly depart for Germany after starring in her most successful film? When she returned to America, had the racist attitudes and restrictions in Hollywood improved at all? Had all that time in front of cameras stolen her soul, as her parents first warned her?