I’m Benito M. Vergara, Jr. (Sunny Vergara to everyone who knows me) and I’m thrilled to be a new blogger for Asianweek.com.
Since this is my first post, I might as well introduce myself: I’ve dabbled in newspaper writing in different capacities for almost two decades, writing for my high school and college newspapers back in my hometown of Los Banos in the Philippines, plus an internship at Philippine News in the mid-’90s. I’ve also been blogging as The Wily Filipino for almost five years now, and this new blog for Asianweek.com is an exciting opportunity to combine these two areas of experience. I have also been a teacher in different places all over the San Francisco Bay Area, and — here comes the confession — I am also something of a music and movie nerd.
And hence, “American Pop”. Still, the task is somewhat daunting, even if my assignment for this blog is to write about a topic that has happily consumed me for most of my life: “mainstream pop culture”. And I’m supposed to write about it from “an Asian American perspective”. But what that means exactly, I’m not so sure. (My former students and I spent entire semesters exploring different aspects of “What is Asian American?” and always finished with more questions than answers, which is how I like it.)
This blog is rather different from what I used to do, for I was trained as a cultural anthropologist, working specifically on immigration. But if an anthropologist’s work is to sift through the social lives of everyday objects, to mine the ordinary for cultural significance, to tease out the connections – okay, other than the “intensive hanging out” with people that we anthropologists do — then I’m probably more prepared than I think.
See you all soon!