Latest news with #AsianAmerican
NZ Herald
5 hours ago
- Health
- NZ Herald
Many lung cancers are now in non-smokers. Scientists want to know why
'My family needs me,' she recalled thinking. Chen's case represents a confounding reality for doctors who study and treat lung cancer, the deadliest cancer in the United States. The disease's incidence and death rates have dropped over the last few decades, thanks largely to a decline in cigarette use, but lung cancers unrelated to smoking have persisted. The thinking used to be that smoking was 'almost the only cause of lung cancer', said Dr Maria Teresa Landi, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. However, worldwide roughly 10% to 25% of lung cancers now occur in people who have never smoked. Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share is estimated to be 50% or more. These cancers are increasingly drawing the attention of researchers like Landi, who are studying the role that environmental exposures, genetic mutations, or other risk factors might play. They have already found some early hints, including a clear link to air pollution. Physicians are also testing new approaches to better detect lung cancer in non-smokers. They are trying to understand why it is more prevalent: in people of Asian ancestry; in women; and why it is being seen among younger people. 'We all still think about the Marlboro man as what lung cancer looks like,' said Dr Heather Wakelee, chief of oncology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In many cases, though, that's no longer true. 'We're just baffled as to why,' she said. Looking for Clues Many lung cancers in non-smokers have no known cause and are discovered only by chance. That was the case for Sandra Liu, 59, who lives in New Jersey. Liu was diagnosed this year with adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer among non-smokers. Doctors found the mass after she had a full-body check-up during a visit to China — a process popular with some Chinese expatriates visiting the country that includes a chest scan. 'I would have never thought to go for a CT,' she said, noting she had no major symptoms and never smoked. Scientists are starting to see that the biology of cancer in non-smokers like Liu differs from cancers seen in people with a smoking history — and may require different strategies for prevention and detection. One large study, called 'Sherlock Lung' and led by Landi and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, is looking at the mutational signatures, or patterns of mutations across the cancer genomes, of 871 non-smokers with lung cancer from around the world. Their latest findings, published in Nature this month, showed that certain mutations, or changes to DNA, were much more common in people who lived in areas with high amounts of air pollution — for example, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Uzbekistan. More pollution was linked to more mutations. The study did not include data from India, considered to have the highest levels of outdoor pollution. The researchers didn't just find that pollution may directly damage DNA. They also saw signs that pollution causes cells to divide more rapidly, which further increases the likelihood of cancer. Studies have also shown that people who don't smoke but have a family history of lung cancer, such as Chen and Liu — both of Liu's grandfathers had the disease — are at increased risk. This could be because of shared genetics, a common environment or both, said Dr Jae Kim, chief of thoracic surgery at City of Hope in Duarte, California. And scientists know that non-smokers with lung cancer are more likely than people who smoked to have certain kinds of 'driver' mutations, changes to the genome that can cause cancer and drive its spread, Kim said. In contrast, people who smoke tend to accumulate many mutations over time that can eventually lead to cancer. This difference in the type of mutations may be one reason why lung cancer among people under-50 is more prevalent among nonsmokers than smokers. Leah Phillips at her home in Peewee Valley, Kentucky. Photo / Jon Cherry, the New York Times There are probably other factors, too, including exposure to radon, asbestos and possibly aristolochic acid, a compound once common in traditional Chinese medicine. Landi's research linked the compound to lung cancer mutations among Taiwanese patients. Taiwan banned products containing it in 2003. Studies from Asia have also suggested second-hand smoke, fumes from cooking oils, and a history of tuberculosis or other lung disease as possible culprits. However, these potential contributors are less common in the US, where Asian American women who don't smoke are still nearly twice as likely as other women to be diagnosed with the disease, said Scarlett Gomez, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. To understand what's driving the disparity in the US, Gomez, Wakelee and colleagues at other Northern California institutions are now studying the relationships among genes, environmental contaminants and lung cancer in Asian American non-smoking women. 'Ultimately, we want to be able to come up with actionable risk factors, just like we do for breast cancer and colorectal cancer,' Gomez said. Revisiting Screening Guidance Studies like Gomez's may help address the question of who should be screened for lung cancer. In the US, routine screening is recommended only for people aged 50 to 80 who smoked at least the equivalent of one pack of cigarettes per day for 20 years. Because of that, lung cancer in non-smokers is often not caught until it's advanced, said Dr Elaine Shum, an oncologist at NYU Langone Health. That can have devastating consequences for patients like Chen, who is still undergoing treatment after a third metastasis of her cancer. Shum and others are now exploring whether screening should be expanded. In Taiwan, a nationwide trial tested the effectiveness of CT scans in people aged 55 to 75 who never smoked but had one other risk factor. Doctors detected cancer in 2.6% of patients — enough that Taiwan now offers routine screening for non-smokers with a family history of lung cancer. Shum and colleagues recently ran a similar pilot study among women of Asian ancestry who were 40 to 74 and had never smoked. In preliminary results from about 200 patients, they found invasive cancer at comparable rates to the Taiwan study. Data from the full set of 1000 patients who were screened is forthcoming. Still, it would take far more research to determine who in the US, if anyone, would benefit from broader screening and whether it could meaningfully reduce lung cancer deaths. Screening more people can lead to more false positives, which may mean patients get biopsies and other interventions they don't need. And some cancers doctors find are so slow growing that they may never cause harm, said Dr Natalie Lui, a thoracic surgeon at the Stanford University School of Medicine. 'What if we're taking out all these tiny lung cancers that would not have been life-threatening?' Lui said. On the flip side, she thinks of the patients she regularly sees who have aggressive or advanced lung cancers but never smoked. 'If there was screening, we could save their life,' Lui said. The good news is that survival with advanced cancers has improved with newer therapies that effectively keep the disease at bay for years in many patients. Such treatments have benefited Leah Phillips, of Pewee Valley, Kentucky. Doctors first mistakenly diagnosed her with asthma and then anxiety. Later, they said she had pneumonia. When an oncologist finally told her in 2019 that she had metastatic lung cancer, he gave her six to 12 months to live. 'Go home and get your affairs in order,' Phillips remembered him saying. She was 43, and her children were 9, 13, and 14. 'I'm not leaving my kids,' Phillips thought. After getting a second opinion, she started taking a drug that targets one of the driver mutations in lung cancer. She prayed to make it to her eldest child's graduation. 'I cried through his entire senior year,' she said. In June, she watched her middle child graduate. 'Now I need to make it to the next one,' she said. Phillips, who co-founded a non-profit called the Young Lung Cancer Initiative to increase awareness of the condition, said people look at her askance when she tells them she has lung cancer but never smoked. They didn't know it was possible. It's not your grandfather's lung cancer anymore, she tells them. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Written by: Nina Agrawal and Allison Jiang Photographs by: Shuran Huang, Jon Cherry ©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Eater
18 hours ago
- Business
- Eater
At Xi'an Famous Foods, Hand-Ripped Noodles Helped Build an Empire
Jason Wang and his father, David Shi, combine their father-son dynamic into beautiful form at Xi'an Foods, one of the first major businesses to offer hand-pulled noodles in New York City. Pulling inspiration from the family's ancestral home of Xi'an, the New York duo opened the first location in Flushing, Queens, to the gratitude of numerous Asian American immigrant families missing the flavors of home. Today, guests from all backgrounds are among the businesses' millions of customers, who pile into more than 15 locations now spread across New York City. Xi'an Famous Foods is very casual. It's simple dishes, and the presentation is simple. On the one hand, it's like that type of food, but on the other hand, it's also not the easiest to make, especially things such as cold-skin or hand-pulled noodles. We're from Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi Province in China. So as immigrants, we really do miss the food from home. Before 2005, my father, David Shi, was working in various American Chinese restaurants, mostly along the East Coast. I was getting started in college, and at this point, my dad thought, 'Well, Jason's in college. He's off to take care of himself. I'm going to do something that's personal to me, something I always wanted to do,' and that was to start an eatery. He wasn't sure how the food was going to be received. [The year] 2005 was an interesting time for Chinese cuisine, because that was around the time when people were emigrating from regions of China that were new to many New Yorkers. When we started, there were no [pantry products on] Amazon, no delivery service for Asian products or ingredients, even [for] things as simple as black rice vinegar. But at the same time, a lot of people were coming from places like coastal China, Fujian, and Wenzhou. There were more Northern Chinese folks from Northeastern parts of China. There were more Shanghainese speakers and folks from the Shanghai region, and regions of the country that previously didn't see as much immigration to the U.S. That drove a lot of the growth in places like Flushing in Queens and in Chinatown in Manhattan. David Shi (left) and Jason Wang in the restaurant's early days. XI'an Famous Foods I was away in my fall semester at Washington University in St. Louis, and my father decided to start selling bubble tea; he offered food on the side. He was doing hand-pulled noodles and hand-ripped noodles, Liang Pi cold-skin noodles, and spicy cumin lamb burgers. The food started selling better than the bubble tea. The first location was pretty much sort of a hole-in-the-wall type of area in Queens, a bunch of food stalls that came out of the establishment restaurants. My dad didn't really think about going outside of that area. But eventually he looked at his second location, in Flushing. That was how our expansion started. He eventually opened a spot in the Golden Shopping Mall, that basement food court in Flushing. It was a hole-in-the-wall type of place during that time, too. It still exists, but it got renovated around 2017 or 2018, so it's a very different place now than it was before. The menu at Xi'an Famous's first location inside the Golden Shopping Mall in Flushing. The business got so popular, and eventually I started to help him. No one really gave us the guidelines. There was no playbook for this. I officially joined the company in 2009 after I graduated from college. Anthony Bourdain came in 2011. We expanded to where we are now because we've stuck to that tradition. We don't have investments — we have zero investors right now. I think it's a testament to the continued popularity of our food. As we started opening more locations, we started thinking about a central kitchen. I looked at the Starbucks model, in which the company got a roasting plant early on. By our fourth or fifth location, in 2011, we opened our first central kitchen. We started operating out of that central kitchen, which was about 5,000 square feet, and that helped grow our number of stores in the city. Our first location in the city was actually in Chinatown, then the East Village. Who would've thought we would need a ghost kitchen in 2005? We were there for 10 years, right up to when the pandemic started, and our lease was up. It's a place where I learned the ropes, and when we began to really recognize that there's just so much demand from folks who aren't in Chinatown, too. We were really encouraged by that, and Xi'an grew, eventually opening a Midtown location in 2013. The current menu board at the TK of location Xi'an — now digital — features signatures that been available since the early days, including the Liang Pi cold noodles and cumin lamb noodle soup. Clay Williams/Eater The spicy cumin lamb burger and beef hand-ripped noodles. Clay Williams/Eater Some of our first write-ups in the food world were Chinese media saying, 'Hey, you know, they're serving these noodles that a lot of people who are from the region go over to eat because they want to taste their home.' That was like the theme back then. Fast-forward to now: Flushing has changed. All across New York right now, there are a lot of big brands. There's a Fendi over there now. It's different. We currently operate 16 locations — 15 Xi'an Famous Food institutions and one ghost kitchen. And even though the business has expanded, the drive and heart we started with still remain. It's a lot of new businesses doing similar cuisine now, corporate places that try to do similar things. It's great to have selections, but things have become much more homogenized. I miss the creativity back in the day. The focus of the business has remained the same. The mission has always been to do a good job, to serve good food, and to serve food that we would eat ourselves. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Boston Globe
19 hours ago
- Health
- Boston Globe
Many lung cancers are now in nonsmokers. Scientists want to know why.
Chen's case represents a confounding reality for doctors who study and treat lung cancer, the deadliest cancer in the United States. The disease's incidence and death rates have dropped over the last few decades, thanks largely to a decline in cigarette use, but lung cancers unrelated to smoking have persisted. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The thinking used to be that smoking was 'almost the only cause of lung cancer,' said Dr. Maria Teresa Landi, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. But worldwide, roughly 10% to 25% of lung cancers now occur in people who have never smoked. Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share is estimated to be 50% or more. Advertisement These cancers are increasingly drawing the attention of researchers like Landi, who are studying the role that environmental exposures, genetic mutations or other risk factors might play. They have already found some early hints, including a clear link to air pollution. Advertisement Physicians are also testing new approaches to better detect lung cancer in nonsmokers, and trying to understand why it is more prevalent in people of Asian ancestry and women and why it is being seen among younger people. 'We all still think about the Marlboro man as what lung cancer looks like,' said Dr. Heather Wakelee, chief of oncology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In many cases, though, that's no longer true. 'We're just baffled as to why,' she said. Looking for Clues Many lung cancers in nonsmokers have no known cause and are discovered only by chance. That was the case for Sandra Liu, 59, who lives in New Jersey. Liu was diagnosed this year with adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer among nonsmokers. Doctors found the mass after she had a full-body checkup during a visit to China -- a process popular with some Chinese expatriates visiting the country that includes a chest scan. 'I would have never thought to go for a CT,' she said, noting she had no major symptoms and never smoked. Scientists are starting to see that the biology of cancer in nonsmokers like Liu differs from cancers seen in people with a smoking history -- and may require different strategies for prevention and detection. One large study, called 'Sherlock Lung' and led by Landi and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, is looking at the mutational signatures, or patterns of mutations across the cancer genomes, of 871 nonsmokers with lung cancer from around the world. Advertisement Their latest findings, published in Nature this month, showed that certain mutations, or changes to DNA, were much more common in people who lived in areas with high amounts of air pollution -- for example, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Uzbekistan. More pollution was linked to more mutations. (The study did not include data from India, considered to have the highest levels of outdoor pollution.) The researchers didn't just find that pollution may directly damage DNA. They also saw signs that pollution causes cells to divide more rapidly, which further increases the likelihood of cancer. Studies have also shown that people who don't smoke but have a family history of lung cancer, such as Chen and Liu -- both of Liu's grandfathers had the disease -- are at increased risk. This could be because of shared genetics, a common environment or both, said Dr. Jae Kim, chief of thoracic surgery at City of Hope in Duarte, California. And scientists know that nonsmokers with lung cancer are more likely than people who smoked to have certain kinds of 'driver' mutations, changes to the genome that can cause cancer and drive its spread, Kim said. In contrast, people who smoke tend to accumulate many mutations over time that can eventually lead to cancer. This difference in the type of mutations may be one reason lung cancer among people under 50 is more prevalent among nonsmokers than smokers. There are probably other factors, too, including exposure to radon, asbestos and possibly aristolochic acid, a compound once common in traditional Chinese medicine. Landi's research linked the compound to lung cancer mutations among Taiwanese patients. (Taiwan banned products containing it in 2003.) Advertisement Studies from Asia have also suggested secondhand smoke, fumes from cooking oils and a history of tuberculosis or other lung disease as possible culprits. However, these potential contributors are less common in the United States, where Asian American women who don't smoke are still nearly twice as likely as other women to be diagnosed with the disease, said Scarlett Gomez, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. To understand what's driving the disparity in the United States, Gomez, Wakelee and colleagues at other Northern California institutions are now studying the relationships among genes, environmental contaminants and lung cancer in Asian American nonsmoking women. 'Ultimately, we want to be able to come up with actionable risk factors, just like we do for breast cancer and colorectal cancer,' Gomez said. Revisiting Screening Guidance Studies like Gomez's may help address the question of who should be screened for lung cancer. In the United States, routine screening is recommended only for people ages 50 to 80 who smoked at least the equivalent of one pack of cigarettes per day for 20 years. Because of that, lung cancer in nonsmokers is often not caught until it's advanced, said Dr. Elaine Shum, an oncologist at NYU Langone Health. That can have devastating consequences for patients like Chen, who is still undergoing treatment after a third metastasis of her cancer. Shum and others are now exploring whether screening should be expanded. In Taiwan, a nationwide trial tested the effectiveness of CT scans in people ages 55 to 75 who never smoked but had one other risk factor. Doctors detected cancer in 2.6% of patients -- enough that Taiwan now offers routine screening for nonsmokers with a family history of lung cancer. Advertisement Shum and colleagues recently ran a similar pilot study among women of Asian ancestry who were 40 to 74 years old and had never smoked. They found invasive cancer at comparable rates to the Taiwan study. That study included only about 200 women, though. It would take far more research to determine who in the United States, if anyone, would benefit from broader screening and whether it could meaningfully reduce lung cancer deaths. Screening more people can lead to more false positives, which may mean patients get biopsies and other interventions they don't need. And some cancers doctors find are so slow-growing that they may never cause harm, said Dr. Natalie Lui, a thoracic surgeon at the Stanford University School of Medicine. 'What if we're taking out all these tiny lung cancers that would not have been life-threatening?' Lui said. On the flip side, she thinks of the patients she regularly sees who have aggressive or advanced lung cancers but never smoked. 'If there was screening, we could save their life,' Lui said. The good news is that survival with advanced cancers has improved with newer therapies that effectively keep the disease at bay for years in many patients. Such treatments have benefited Leah Phillips, of Pewee Valley, Kentucky. Doctors first mistakenly diagnosed her with asthma and then anxiety. Later, they said she had pneumonia. When an oncologist finally told her in 2019 that she had metastatic lung cancer, he gave her six to 12 months to live. 'Go home and get your affairs in order,' Phillips remembered him saying. She was 43, and her children were 9, 13 and 14. Advertisement 'I'm not leaving my kids,' Phillips thought. After getting a second opinion, she started taking a drug that targets one of the driver mutations in lung cancer. She prayed to make it to her eldest child's graduation. 'I cried through his entire senior year,' she said. In June, she watched her middle child graduate. 'Now I need to make it to the next one,' she said. Phillips, who cofounded a nonprofit called the Young Lung Cancer Initiative to increase awareness of the condition, said people look at her askance when she tells them she has lung cancer but never smoked. They didn't know it was possible. It's not your grandfather's lung cancer anymore, she tells them. This article originally appeared in
Forbes
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Exclusive: Sandra Oh And Sean Wang Leads TAAF's Latest PSA Campaign
The Asian American Foundation (TAAF)'s "Asian+American" Campaign The Asian American Foundation (TAAF), a nonprofit organization focused on serving Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) communities, has unveiled its 'Asian+American' campaign to encourage Asian Americans to celebrate the complexity and beauty of their dual identities. In partnership with global creative agency Wieden+Kennedy New York, TAAF launched a national PSA initiative, directed by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Sean Wang and narrated by Emmy Award-winning actress Sandra Oh, to kick-start the campaign. Powerful portraits and images will be displayed across billboards, digital platforms, social media, and out-of-home locations. According to TAAF's 2025 STAATUS Index, the leading national study of Americans' perceptions of AANHPIs, just 20% of Asian Americans ages 16-24 and 23% overall felt fully accepted for their racial identity. There are these ideas of feeling 'too Asian' or 'not Asian enough,' and torn between choosing one identity, culture, language, and names over the other to fit in. TAAF hopes the campaign will spark a sense of pride in being both Asian and American, especially among the younger generations. 'For too long, Asian Americans have been made to feel like we must shrink, code-switch, or choose between identities just to be seen as American enough,' said Norman Chen, CEO of TAAF, in a press statement. 'At TAAF, we are focused on building a future where our community can thrive in safety, prosperity, and true belonging—free from discrimination, slander, and violence. Belonging begins with being seen and heard, and we hope this campaign sparks the kind of honest conversations that help us own, and celebrate, every part of who we are. Directed by Wang, the campaign's PSA, a 60-second short film called Beyond, Together, explores this pressure to choose between these two identities and 'offers an intimate look at Asian American individuals embracing their full selves without limits or compromises.' The Park Pictures director has touched on his Asian American identity in his Sundance darling feature, Dìdi. So, developing the short film was not a stretch for him. 'My own Asian American identity and sense of belonging are things I've attempted to define for myself through my work,' said Wang, who also participated in the inaugural Sundance Institute | TAAF Fellowship 2022 cohort. 'Through those experiences, I've connected with so many others who share the unique challenges of navigating multiple cultural identities.' Oh, who had shared her experiences of systematic racism in Hollywood, is honored to lend her voice yet again for TAAF's project. She had previously worked with them on the 2022 TAAF-supported PBS documentary, Rising Against Asian Hate: One Day In March. 'Lending my voice on a message so close to my heart—one that represents my community—has tremendous meaning for me,' said Oh. 'Working with TAAF to highlight the intersectionality of our identities and cultures has been a project made out of love by everyone who has touched it. I'm so honored to be part of giving this message to the AAPI community and with the world.' The Asian American Foundation (TAAF)'s "Asian+American" Campaign There has been an increased presence in AANHPI representation in all industries and on social media, with many reconnecting with their heritage, proudly speaking their languages, celebrating their foods and culture, and reclaiming their Asian names. Yet, they're often only celebrated nationally during May for Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month. TAAF invites the public to celebrate their pride all year round by sharing their 'Asian+American' story and celebrating their declaration of being and belonging to both. Using the #AsianPlusAmerican (and tag @TAAForg), the campaign aims to amplify the diverse voices, experiences, and identities that shape the Asian American community and show the world what it truly means to be both. To learn more about TAAF's 'Asian+American' campaign, visit
Winnipeg Free Press
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Book Review: Grief is profound, painful and personal in this debut novel from J.B. Hwang
'Mendell Station' is Korean American writer J.B. Hwang's first novel. And it is all about death — its horror, finality and mystery, and, most of all, how those who knew and loved that person must cope. Miriam, the main character, who is a Korean American postal worker living in San Francisco, learns that her best friend, Esther, was found dead, having fallen two stories onto the train tracks at Van Ness station. The mystery of how Esther died is never solved in the book, although we learn she had been intoxicated and wobbly on her feet when last seen at a bar. The narrative focuses more on Miriam's initial confusion and the painful emotional attempt at mourning and eventual acceptance. 'The love I had for Esther distended and became a fluid that filled my skull… My skeleton felt ripped out of my body, and I crumpled to the floor. The sound of many waters, weighted clouds in the sky, thin black grooves between the wooden floorboards teeming with darkness.' Like many great novels, the specifics are clear — the Asian American experience, which is quite different from the white or Black American experience, in many ways, or the details of working at the post office, the menial, never-ending repetition — as fitting the expression 'going postal' — but also the gentle kindness of the regular folks who are her co-workers. The universal human story of losing a loved one comes alive amid the backdrop of these specifics, like many great novels. It is very moving. The experience, happening amid the confusion that came in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, is so unsettling Miriam's faith in God is shattered. She starts writing letters to Esther that never get delivered to cope with her grief. 'Esther, I wondered why I didn't want to kill myself after you died, when I couldn't stop thinking about it after my father's death. Would I be recognizable to you now, without my faith, without you? I don't like who I am without you,' goes one of her letters. This is a book that speaks to women, especially Asian American women, and those who have just lost a loved one. And this writer happens to fit all those categories. Still, it's a good book for anyone. Hwang is comfortable switching from a language that is a myopic closeup in its descriptiveness to free-wheeling poetic grandeur on the same page, entering the mind and soul of the woman who is our heroine. It matters more than ever that she is an Asian American in a storytelling universe dominated by white people. Yet it matters not at all. Hwang's writing often doesn't bother with stage-setting, or scene or character descriptions. Readers feel as though they have simply slipped into Miriam's skin. We know through our own skin and bones, rather than read and learn, the sad memories of our upbringing, the routine drudgery of work, the loneliness and the joy of finding a friend, and the unbearable grief of losing one. The effect is mesmerizing, and strangely comforting. We affirm through the journey that Hwang takes us on that lesson we knew all along: We must live. Those who have gone want that and expect that of us. ___ AP book reviews:
