The trial of the second officer charged in connection with U.S. Army Private Danny Chen’s hazing death starts today. Many in the Asian American community, including Private Chen’s family, were shocked and dismayed last week when a court martial panel cleared Sergeant Adam Holcomb of the most serious charges and sentenced him to only thirty days in jail. According to fellow officers who served with Chen in Afghanistan, Chen was subjected to racial taunts and singled out for physical abuse by his superiors before he took his own life. We’ll speak with Attorney Liz Ouyang, president of the Organization of Chinese Americans, the leading advocacy group in this case, for an update from Fort Bragg, North Carolina on the court martial trial of Sergeant Ryan Offutt, the second of eight officers to stand trial.

Supporters of affirmative action file their amici briefs today in support of University of Texas (UT)-Austin in Fisher vs UT-Austin, the latest Supreme Court case on race-conscious college admissions. Conservative pundits are quick to point to Asian Americans as a racial minority unfairly disadvantaged by affirmative action, and the mainstream media holds up Asian Americans as the new face of affirmative action opponents. What is at stake for Asian Americans in this national debate? To help us sort through fact from fiction, we will be joined by Thomas Mariadason, staff attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Eric Tang, African and African Diaspora Studies professor at University of Texas-Austin; and Robert Teranishi, Principal Investigator for the National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education.

What happens when a struggling writer is unexpectedly confronted with the suicide of an estranged best friend? So begins Don Lee's new novel, The Collective, which follows a group of three Asian American artists struggling to make sense of their lives and careers over two decades of college, career plateaus, dating mishaps, and the multiculturalism of the 1990s. APF’s Leyla Mei spoke with the author recently about his writing process, why he put race at the center of his novel, and whether questions of Asian American identity remain relevant for young writers.