San Francisco Chronicle’s Asian Pop Columnist Jeff Yang comments about the once-derogatory term “FOB”, “When Hwang and I were growing up, it was always clearly an acronym, with each letter spoken out loud, Eff Oh Bee. For Teresa and Serena and their generational peers, the term “fob” has become monosyllabic, rhyming with “rob” — disconnecting it from its expression of origin and softening its harsh meaning…There’s something metaphorical about the move from “F.O.B.” to “fob.” A fob, after all, is a length of chain tied to a watch, allowing you to readily draw it forth; it’s an omnipresent link to something precious — something that always tells you what time it is.”
Yang also quotes graphic novelist, Gene Yang, “…the high school Teresa and Serena attended, has one of the most Asian student populations in the nation. ‘It’s like 80 percent Asian,’ he says. ‘The average SAT scores there are through the roof, and they have no football team, but an absolutely killer badminton team.’”
—An accent on love: Cherishing our immigrant parents — malapropisms, cultural disconnects and all by Jeff Yang
CNNGo also featured us twice this month—thanks, Chris!
So why blog today? Because My Mom is a Fob just turned one. (My Dad is a Fob is a week younger and celebrates on the 25th.) The fob-filled year in recap:
- October 17, 2008: The very first posts and birth of “Is funk means sexy?”
- October 21, 2008: Teresa is qualified and ready to teach Online Marketing for Dummies
- October 22, 2008: Hyphen joins the ranks of Disgrasian and Angry Asian Man and also blogs about us (then publishes us in print a few months later for a Mother’s Day feature)
- October 26, 2008: Go Productions loves us too?
- October 31, 2008: Holla at Margaret Cho! I guess we’re now famous by association.
- November 11, 2008: Neatorama skyrockets our readership for one day…and then we lose track of all bloggers, high school newspapers, and British journalists who feature us after that.
- November 18, 2008: We accidentally curse on live radio and someone named Angry Ninja says we’re “insanely popular“…? wow.
- November—Thanksgiving Break, 2008: I skip school and escape to Thailand for a week while Teresa meets up with Phil of Wong Fu Productions.
- December 23, 2008: T & S reunite at HoChie’s and get spotlighted.
- December 28, 2008: We meet up with Phil of Wong Fu again in good ol’ Mission Coffee and come up with some awesome ideas saved for the future.
- January 2009: New year, new start? We get lives. Teresa studies abroad in Cyprus and also visits Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Slovakia, Israel, and Egypt. We finish our 61-page book proposal and send that to our Writer’s House agent, who starts contacting publishers.
- February-March 2009: School gets tough. Teresa is still gone. MMIAF is receiving way too many hits and overburdening Bluehost’s servers, so they suspend us multiple times until I decide to switch mom’s over to Linode.
- April 2009: We score a book deal with Penguin’s Perigee Books! I present two workshops with HoChie at the ITASA West Coast and Midwest Conferences.
- May 2009: I graduate a year early and Teresa is back from Cyprus!
- June 2009: Teresa leaves for New York and I leave for Taipei.
- July 2009: Teresa is still in New York and I’m still in Taipei…but we’re still updating the blogs while on vacation/internships…
- August 2009: I’m typhooned in and then leave for Kuala Lumpur, Brunei, Singapore, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Teresa’s finishing up her internship in New York! We keep on blogging…
- September 2009: Teresa leaves for Taipei and Korea (we barely miss each other), I come back to the Bay, then Teresa comes back to the Bay and leaves for school in San Diego. We both blog some more.
- October 2009: Jeff Yang features us on SFGate …and we just keep blogging on, no matter where we are.
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