First the musicians: Michelle Branch and Norah Jones
Michelle Branch has Indonesian maternal grandparents and is a contemporary pop musicians. Here is her official website and here is her wikipedia entry. I actually first thought that Branch might be mixed-Asian because she looked like one of my cousins (who is also mixed-race Asian).
Norah Jones is another singer-songwriter (she is, apparently, compared to Michelle Branch, interestingly enough). Her very famous musician father is Ravi Shankar, which makes her half Bengali. Here is her official website and wikipedia entry. This probably says a lot about my musical tastes, but I have all three of Jones's albums, although I wasn't necessarily a fan of the last one in the way that I really loved her first and second records.
Now for the male comedians: Fred Armisen, Rob Schneider, and Steve Byrne.
I've already written about Armisen at the end of a former post (click here) so I'll go straight on to
Rob Schneider--here is his wikipedia entry and official site. Schneider has a maternal grandmother who is Filipina and has portrayed Asian Americans (in pretty obnoxiously racist ways) in some of his films (Ula in Fifty First Dates and a Japanese American minister in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry). Which of course, begs the question: is it racist when a mixed-race Asian American does racist caricatures of Asian Americans? I have an answer, of course, but thought I'd throw that out there.
Finally, we have Steve Byrne--his mother is Korean and his father is Irish, at least according to his official website. I caught Byrne's act on Comedy Central two different times--the stuff I saw didn't seem to concentrate on his ethnic/racial identity but apparently he does use this as comic fodder in his show.
So there we have it--five mixed-race Asian Americans in entertainment--feel free to name anyone else I have missed--I'm sure there are many!
