Back in the U.S. -- Obama speech today -- Annabel blog today

I arrived in DC this morning after traveling across the Pacific, then across the country three times, as well as up the California coast all in the past few days. I slept for an hour, woke up for Obama’s speech, and then went back to sleep until 10 PM. I guess we can safely say my schedule has been thrown out of whack by my travels. Tomorrow morning Annabel and I will talk to students at Georgetown about immigration and our documentary 9500 Liberty. We gave a similar talk at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, Japan a week ago.

My last blog was written while in Seoul, Korea. Among several other amazing experiences that occurred since that post, we traveled to the House of Sharing, where many "Comfort Station" survivors live together, and we met and talked with Lee Ok Sun, the second of two women whose stories we told in this YouTube video (Lee Ok Sun’s translated testimony was read by Kimberly-Rose Wolter). As soon as I recuperate, I promise to post footage from this encounter, and many other experiences during the past two weeks in Asia and in Houston, Texas (for Obama). Annabel wrote eloquently about the "Comfort Women" issue, her philosophy, and our experience in her first addition to our new blog for AsianWeek.

During a very brief visit to San Francisco over the weekend, I encountered several people who thanked me for writing for AsianWeek, confessing that they had been embarrassed by current and past columnists such as Kenneth Ng and Emil Amok (that’s what they call him but this is not his name). I’ve long struggled with the question: to what extent should we be embarrassed by people who come from the same community? Perhaps I’ll address this in a future column.

In a related issue, I wanted to briefly reference Barack Obama’s speech today -- click here to see it as broadcast on CNN, with the text of the speech included or click here to see it in high resolution (but it takes some navigating).

In my view, this speech was historic, much more so than the Iowa speech (during which I chased down a 10-year-old and made her watch it for posterity), or any of the speeches I have seen Obama make in person. I would encourage anyone reading this to watch the speech in it’s entirety before reading my or anyone else’s commentary on it. I think the message here is deeply personal, both for the speaker, and for all those of us he is speaking to. How you respond should be your own choice. After all, this choice is fundamental to your personal identity, and, I collectively, will be fundamental to our identity as a nation.