Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is AArisings?
A: AArisings was started January 1990 focusing specifically on Asian American music artists.Since then the focus has expanded to include all areas of entertainment. Throughout the last 18 years, AArisings has remained strictly a non-profit, web-based media resource and publication about Asian Pacific Americans in the entertainment world.

Q: Who is behind AArisings?
A: Often times, people think there is a team of people behind AArisings. Fact of the matter is, it's just me, Nelson Wong. I do get a lot of help from freelance volunteers and people who submit their links to me and I consider them my own team behind AArisings. Without them, the site would not be what it is today.

Q: How many hits do you receive a day?
A: Surprisingly, without any advertisement and primarily thru word-of-mouth, AArisings gets thousands of visitors a day . The most hits in one day happened after an SF Chronicle news article entitled, "Eyeing Asian American E-Shoppers: Web sites try to cash in on most wired ethnic group" and there were over 75,000 hits on June 19, 2000, the day the article came out.

Q: Where do you find most of your links?
A: A large majority of the links are user submitted. I've been lucky enough to have some really great people, whom I have never met, who have contributed hundreds upon hundreds of sites to me because they wanted to return something back after they've found AArisings useful to them. On average, I probably get 2 to 3 link submissions a day. Before adding, I always review the site first to make sure it meets AArisings' linking criteria and if it does, it gets added.

Q: Is there anything you won't add as a link?
A: My philosophy on being Asian American is that you can't just pigeonhole a group of people. As a result, I will link to a variety of sites, even those that may not be politically correct or fit my own views, but I try to be as open minded about the sites that are added as possible as long as they aren't promoting anything illegal. My belief is that a stereotype is created because of a lack of images. So, my own solution is to show all possible images and let the viewers choose for themselves. The more diversity in images both positive and negative, the less stereotyping is possible.

As surprising as this may be, I actually get quite a number of link submissions from people and the site has nothing to do with being Asian American. About 10% of the submitted sites are ones that I don't link to because they don't meet the linking criteria OR they are submitted sites that are already in the database.

Q: What's in the future for AArisings?
A: More creative content and syndicated content, plus more interviews with new and established APAs in the entertainment industry. Find out more at on our blog.