By Oliver Wang

I couldn’t really tell you when I first met Gina Hotta, but only because I ran into her so many times, it’s impossible to untangle the chronology. You could not have been interested in Asian American community and culture issues in the Bay Area in the 1990s and not have crossed paths with Gina. She was seemingly at every event—whether rally or concert—and wherever she wasn’t in bodily person, she was there on the radio or…

By Kathleen Wentz

You could still see the dried blood on Sudok Choi’s bandaged left ear. A week before, the owner of Koryo BBQ in Oakland had been in a car accident, which had also left her arm in a cast. But it wasn’t her wounds that most worried Choi; it was the cost of her health insurance.

“It’s my biggest financial concern right now,” she said through the translation of her 19-year-old son, Tae Kim,…

By Dave Yoo

Everyone I know thinks my working out of the home is the ultimate luxury, as if I’m some spoiled brat who gets to laze around all day long in my pajamas and bunny slippers, drinking multiple mugs of tea and watching Premier League soccer games every afternoon. Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely perks to the scenario—as my own day-to-day boss, I get to make my own hours and I don’t…

Courtesy of U.S. Navy/Brian K. Fromal

By Julie Ha

There were a tense few moments on Sept. 14 when the crew of the USS Anzio came across an unidentified vessel off the coast of Somalia. The Anzio is the flagship for a multinational naval force formed in January to patrol the area, where pirates from the politically unstable Somalia have attacked freighters, yachts and cruise ships. Normally, vessels in these…