Rice Daddies Here, There, and Everywhere!

This has been quite a week for the Rice Daddies! You'll find us on the web, on the radio and in person, plus our anniversary contest ends this Saturday! The deets on our doings:

• Sorry for the short notice, but tonight from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. PST, I'm a guest on KPFA's Apex Express, an Asian American public affairs call-in program in the Bay Area. Hyphen Magazine blog editor erin Khue Ninh and teen Kai Kane Aoki Izu, son of prominent AsAm performing artists Brenda Wong Aoki and Mark Izu, will be talking everyone's favorite Asian American parenting issue—Amy Chua's Tiger Mom. You can stream the audio at kpfa.org and call in at 1-800-HEY-KPFA, and if they archive the audio I'll post a link later.

UPDATE: Here's the audio for last night's program.

APEX Express Fund Drive Show - February 24, 2011 at 7:00pm

Click to listen (or download)

• Our own InstantYang, a.k.a. OriginalSpin, a.k.a. journalist extraordinaire Jeff Yang, muses about his youngest son's 3rd birthday in his Asian Pop column on the San Francisco Chronicle's SFGate website and devotes a good part of the column to us! Read the column for some great thoughts about parenting, parenting online, and Asian American fatherhood, from Jeff, me, and some of our other great co-conspirators here on Rice Daddies. Thanks, Jeff, and thanks, guys!

• On Saturday, February 26, I will be reppin' the Rice Daddies at Banana 2, the second ever conference of APA bloggers in Los Angeles. I'll be speaking on a diverse panel in the afternoon on niche blogging, and I hope I can bring the issues and concerns of dadblogging and parentblogging to the group alongside colleagues who write about food, sex, and specific ethnic culture. If you're a reader or commenter and you're there, please introduce yourself!

UPDATE: Here's the panel on niche blogging, with me and my awesome co-panelists! I had an amazing time and will write up my thoughts more fully soon.

• Finally, our amazing 5th anniversary contest ends this Saturday. You still have time to enter to win one of five sets of the awesome Bobby Ellis-Chan middle-grade novels autographed by author Lisa Yee and illustrator Dan Santat. Just go to the post and read for instructions.

• And if you tweet, follow us on Twitter @RiceDaddies! (I'm there too @dad_strangeland.) If you need to get in touch with us, we're always reachable by email at ricedaddies@gmail.com. Thanks, y'all!

Rice Daddies Turns 5! To Celebrate, We're Giving You Gifts!

Rice Daddies, the group blog by Asian American dads, launched on February 6, 2006. Which means that yesterday, we turned 5! And we're still here! I mean, happy birthday to us! Heh. Five years ago, I wrote:

We're a group of dads of the Asian persuasion, most of us only 2 years or less into the parenting game. We're bicoastal and multiethnic, Chinese- and Japanese- and Filipino- and Korean- and biracial- Americans. We're writers and lawyers and businessmen and teachers (oh my!), stay-at-home and work-at-home and wish-we-could-work-at-home dads. We're dads who happen to be Asian, and Asians who happen to be dads. And we mention both, matter-of-factly, because they both matter.

Which is not to say that this is gonna be all serious all the time, or all political, or all race-centric. Of course, we're not promising that when we try to be funny, that'll work all the time either. (Except for MetroDad. We give you a money-back guarantee that he will always be piss-your-pants funny.) But really, this is just a place where we can muddle through our own experiences of what it means to be raising the next generation of Asian American young'ns in the technicolor 21st century.

Since then, we've seen old contributors go and welcomed new voices on board, and we've gotten more diverse in terms of ethnic background, geographic location, and length and breadth of parenting experience. (And we're always looking for more, so shoot us a note at ricedaddies@gmail.com if you wanna add your voice to the fray.) We've enjoyed making connections and building community with other Asian American parents, parents of color, and parents of children of color both on- and off-line (and we hope to meet a lot of you at the big Banana 2 AsAm blogger confab on Feb. 26 in LA!), and we look forward to continuing the discussion as our kids get older and teach us more about what it means to Asian Americans who are dads and dads who are Asian American.

To celebrate our 5th blogaversary, the amazing and prolific author Lisa Yee has graciously donated 5 sets of her two Bobby Ellis-Chan books to give away to Rice Daddies readers, signed by both her and illustrator (and AsAm dad) Dan Santat. Lisa's middle-grade novels have always featured Asian American characters, like Millicent Min, Stanford Wong, and her American Girl books, and her Bobby Ellis-Chan books portray the everyday life of an interracial family, comprised of a boy trying to find his place in his family and school, his princess-obsessed little sister, his football star older sister, their Chinese American businesswoman mom, and their non-Asian pro-football-player-turned-stay-at-home-dad, with humor, a keen, sensitive eye, and a matter-of-factness about the family's racial background that I found refreshing. And my six-year-old daughter absolutely loved them!



To enter to win a set of autographed copies of Bobby Vs. Girls (Accidentally) and Bobby The Brave (Sometimes) for your young readers, leave a comment on this post by midnight PST on Saturday, February 26, listing your or your kids' favorite children's book either by an author or illustrator of color or featuring characters of color. At the end of the contest, we'll compile all of your recommendations into a single post and we'll have a random drawing for five winners.

Thank you for all of your support over the years, for reading, commenting, linking, and coming back. You're why this isn't just a blog, but a community. (Okay, sappiness over. Heh.)