Half-Asians

I was inspired to write a post about Vanessa Minnillo after seeing her make a guest appearance on last week’s episode of 30 Rock. She was very funny as the ethnically ambiguous Carmen Chao: was she Mexican? Chinese? maybe Jamaican? You decide:

Of course she is half-Asian in real life: specifically, she is Filipina on her mom’s side, and Irish and Italian on her dad’s side.

She is best known for being named Miss Teen USA in 1998 and for hosting MTV’s Total Request Live from 2003 to 2007. She has also done quite a bit of acting, her latest role being her appearance on 30 Rock.

She and her fiancé Nick Lachey will be appearing later this month on an episode of Hawaii Five-0. She joins a growing list of beautiful hapa girls to appear on the show, including Dichen Lachman, Kelly Hu, and Reiko Aylesworth, to name a few.

Vanessa recently joined Twitter. And, as usual, you can learn more about her at Wikipedia and IMDb.

Pictures and video after the jump.

View gallery »

Here’s another February cover girl on a Philippines magazine, this one on the cover of Cosmopolitan Philippines.

Solenn Marie Adea Heussaff is a Filipina-French commercial/print model, fashion designer, make-up artist, painter, singer, and actress in the Philippines. She finished in the final three on Survivor Philippines: Celebrity Showdown this past fall, and she stars in the movie My Valentine Girls which is being released in theaters in the Philippines this Wednesday.

Solenn is on Twitter and has an official Facebook fan page. Also check out her
Wikipedia entry, her IMDb entry, and this article from Rogue Magazine.

Pictures and video after the jump.

View gallery »

I’ve written before about how great British magazines are compared to their American counterparts, but I could say the same about their corresponding Philippines editions (even the not-always-accurate Cosmo). Their biggest advantage of course is that they feature beautiful Filipinas and other gorgeous Asian women, with a healthy mix of mixed-race Asian beauties. Case in point: the February 2011 issue of FHM Philippines, with the incomparable Misa Campo on the cover and this hottie, Kim Lee, featured as the “Girlfriend of the Month“.

By day, Kim manages her family’s beauty salon and is starting up a jewelry/accessories venture, but she is best known for her part-time work as a model, primarily in music videos. You may have seen her and Justene Jaro in the video for Flo Rida’s “Club Can’t Handle Me”, or perhaps you recognize her from Far East Movement’s “Rocketeer” video. She is set to appear in the second Hangover movie which will be in theaters later this year.

Kim, a California girl who was born in Orange County and now lives in Malibu, is three-fourths Vietnamese and one-fourth French. That makes her the first three-fourths Asian that I’ve featured, as well as a member of the hot Asian-French club.

Check out Kim’s website, blog, Twitter, MySpace, official YouTube, personal YouTube, and ModelMayhem, and visit HipHopVideoModels.net for even more photos.

Pictures and video after the jump.

View gallery »

I’m always fascinated by Americans who spend most of their childhood outside of the United States but who end up returning here as teenagers or young adults and doing quite well. A few examples of Americans who spent much of their youth in Asia include Rumi Neely, Olivia Munn, and this beautiful woman.

Angela “Angie” Goff is a traffic and entertainment news anchor on WUSA-TV Channel 9 in Washington, D.C. She was born in Seoul to a Korean mother and to a Caucasian father who was in the U.S. Army. She lived there for most of her first sixteen years of life, before moving with her family to a D.C. suburb. Check out her Wikipedia entry and this magazine article to see how she got from there to where she is now.

Angie is an avid blogger and is also on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo.

For more information, check out her WUSA9 profile and this blog posting. And check out these great photos (including the one above) taken by Katherine Hauschka of KateHaus & Alpine Moon Photography.

Pictures and video after the jump.

View gallery »

Cory Lee Urhahn is an actress and R&B singer-songwriter from Vancouver. She is Chinese on her mom’s side and German on her dad’s side.

Her acting credits include the MTV movie 2ge+her in 2000 and the Canadian TV series Instant Star in 2007-2008, and she currently has a recurring role as a teacher on the Canadian series Degrassi: The Next Generation.

Also, she has released two well-received studio albums (What a Difference a Day Makes in 2005, and Sinful Innocence in 2007), with a third album due out this summer.

You can follow her Twitter, her Facebook profile, her Facebook page, her MySpace, and her YouTube channel. She also has a fashion blog, a music blog, and an official website.

You can learn more about her at Wikipedia and IMDb. And check out this Toro Magazine article which includes several great photos (including the one above).

Pictures and video after the jump.

View gallery »

Surely I’m not the only person who’s noticed that the Disney Channel features plenty of mixed-race girls in its programming. (Whereas, it features few if any mixed-race boys, mostly preferring white actors, especially for lead roles. But that’s a discussion for another website.)

Off the top of my head, the list of mixed-race Disney actresses includes Vanessa Hudgens, half-Mexicans Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato, and Miley Cyrus (just kidding about that last one, though Miley does have a half-Asian look-alike who happens to be an amateur pornstar: search for “sasha brooke tube8” ). Well here is another actress to add to that list.

Kelsey Asbill Chow is an actress from Columbia, South Carolina, who may be best known for playing Gigi on the teen soap One Tree Hill from 2005 to 2009. This past year, she took a break from her studies at Columbia University in the City of New York (continuing in the tradition of teen actresses on hiatus from Columbia such as Lauryn Hill, Katie Holmes, Anna Paquin, and Emmy Rossum) to star in the Disney Channel movie Den Brother as well as on the Disney XD series Pair of Kings.

Like fellow actress Malese Jow, she is half-Chinese and half-Caucasian/Native American.

For more info, check out her website, her Wikipedia entry, and her IMDb entry. Also check out this interview and this fascinating NY Post article about how she (and other teen stars) decided whether to attend college.

Pictures and video after the jump.

View gallery »

I gotta admit that I’ve been looking forward to this post for some time. After the jump is a collection of photos and videos of the beautiful AV actress Maria Ozawa, who turns 25 today.

View gallery »

As I’ve mentioned before, Twitter is often the social network of choice for ladies to post photos of themselves from their mobile phones while they’re out on the town. And of course, New Year’s Eve is one of the biggest going-out nights of the year, so my Twitter feed that night and the next day was flooded with pictures of half-Asian beauties.

Here is a collection of photos that were posted on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day by ladies I follow on Twitter, including photos tweeted (or retweeted) by Arianny Celeste, Gina T, Jessica Michibata, Justene Jaro, Kimberly Ann, Leilani Dowding, Lyla Dee, Maya Michelle Rew, Michelle Banzer, Monique May, Natalia Marie, Natalja Sundseth (aka Talia Sunset), Olivia Munn, and Tracy Nova.

View gallery »