Lynda Lin Grigsby

When my husband and I learned that we’d unwittingly passed on the genetic condition to our son, we realized that it would be up to us to cover the costs of fixing it.
We learned something was wrong from a routine X-ray image. There were my son’s baby teeth and gums. And then, below, there should have been a row of “tooth buds,” the dentist explained. The term made me think of plant sprouts, but tooth buds look like, well, teeth. Or at least they’re supposed to.
For my son, th...

A living memorial to the past and present honoring all who were incarcerated in the U.S. during WWII is now at L.A.’s Japanese American National Museum
For Bill Fujioka, a first-of-its-kind book that lists every person of Japanese ancestry incarcerated during World War II reads like a personal family history book.
Among the 125,284 names listed in the unassuming-looking book are those of his father, Willie Fujioka, a U.S. veteran, his grandfather Fred Fujioka, and other family members. With o...

As anti-Asian hate rages across the nation, moms are taking a stand. But the fight isn't new.
Lily Chin relived the trauma of her son's gruesome death on national television for a reason. Wearing a dark blazer and a pink and white ruffled blouse, she was the epitome of maternal grief on The Phil Donahue Show. Through sobs, she said the two white men who beat her son with a baseball bat killed him "like an animal." In 1983, Vincent Chin's mother didn't have the internet or social media to crow...

Maskot, Westend61/Getty Images
In a store check-out line, friendship can blossom quickly. Accompanied by the rhythmic beeping of the scanners, my son's eyes lock on his new best buddy: the kid standing behind us in line. They talk in hushed tones, huddled together like the world around them doesn’t exist.
Because I live in a suburban Los Angeles neighborhood where the number of new moms per capita is low, I recognize the hunger for connection. It starts with a stranger’s delighted sizing up o...

Mom 2.0
“We are not the same people,” said Laura Mayes to a ballroom full of moms last month. She was addressing an audience who’d pivoted again and again through a pandemic and up to the moment we find ourselves in now: a limbo between almost-but-not normalcy and a still ongoing pandemic. Mayes, an Emmy-winning writer and co-founder of Mom 2.0, was welcoming the crowd to the start of the organization’s 3-day summit in Los Angeles. For the first time since 2019, the Mom 2.0 community had come...

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Vincent Chin has been with author Paula Yoo for over half of her life. (Photo: Jarod Lew)
Stories are the shape of our existence. On the 40th Anniversary of his death, three AAPI artists and storytellers carry on Chin’s legacy.
By Lynda Lin Grigsby, Contributor
A love letter is a blank canvas on which emotions are painted. For his latest commissioned piece, a portrait to commemorate the legacy of Vincent Chin, the artist Anthony Lee received little direction.
...

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This preliminary rendering shows the Irehi or Spirit Consoling Structure early in the design process, with projection technology and gold fracture line designs.
The Irei Names Monument seeks to make visible what was once erased — all the names of the Japanese Americans incarcerated.
By Lynda Lin Grigsby, Contributor
In 1903, on a ship bound for the United States, Ayaka Takahashi — as the ship’s manifest identified him — befriended a passenger who questioned th...

Child language brokers are children—often from immigrant families—who linguistically translate for family members. I was one of them. Here's what experts have to say.
A guttural cry woke me up from the darkest corral of sleep the night before the big test. I had been studying for weeks under the florescent light at the kitchen table, the scene where a mountain of books and pamphlets about the U.S. government teetered close to a landslide. The test would determine U.S. citizenship, and it wasn...

On a Zoom call with Romper the day before she was set to appear at the Mom 2.0 Summit on a panel about online safety last month, Frances Haugen does not mince words: What we are facing is nothing short of a public health emergency.
She would know.
Haugen is a former Facebook data scientist who made international headlines as the whistleblower who disclosed internal documents to Congress and the SEC about...

Tooth agenesis, including oligodontia, may be rare but it can cause issues if your child has it. Here's what parents need to look out for.

Kristi Yamaguchi knows what it means to be the best and has a gold medal to prove she was the top female figure skater at the Winter Olympics in 1992.
But that was then. Today, Yamaguchi is breaking into a new sport: kung fu, the Chinese martial art that can be every bit as graceful as figure skating but also a lot more aggressive. The champion on ice is training to become a kung fu master on land.
Those who practice kung fu consider it exercise, self-defense and a way of life. Yamaguchi, 50,...

Onscreen, ‘Manzanar, Diverted’ examines the intersections of race and history. Between the frames, it centers three generations of Japanese American female activists.

“Remembrance,” shown behind Bob Matsumoto, is a symbol of the loss of freedom and dignity of the Japanese American community. (Photo: Courtesy of Bob Matsumoto)
The art director on carrying on the legacy of kindness, combating anti-Asian hate and the need for creative thinking.
By Lynda Lin Grigsby, Contributor
Bob Matsumoto is the patron saint of creativity. The advertising art director, whose name and work continues to echo in the minds of industry trendsetters long after his retirement, is...

Yoshio “Yosh” Nakamura once braved gunfire in the name of the American flag as a World War II veteran. Last July, he was given the opportunity to sign a flag as a hero and a survivor of a mass incarceration experience.
“I was very, very touched,” said Nakamura, 96, of Whittier, who served on the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated Japanese American unit during WWII known today as the most highly decorated unit for its size and length of service in U.S. military history. While he fought...