By Adelaide Chen    
On Thanksgiving Day, mostly elderly Chinese stood in line for a free meal hours before the doors opened at the Salvation Army in Oakland Chinatown.  The atmosphere was lively as a hundred volunteers brought plates of the traditional holiday food to crowds unfamiliar with turkey and mashed potatoes.

By Guo Shipeng 
Chinese elders at Hotel Oakland, a seniors’ home on the edge of the Chinatown, had an early Thanksgiving party on Thursday November 20. Check out what it’s like.

By Guo Shipeng  – 

Every Tuesday afternoon, a group of about 20 Chinese elders gather for a small singing event in Hotel Oakland, a senior’s home on the outskirts of the city’s Chinatown.
Their average age is over 75 and they practice a wide range of Chinese songs, both old and new.  
CLICK TO LISTEN
[audio:http://rosebud.journalism.berkeley.edu/~j200/510report/chineseseniorssinging.mp3]

By Guo Shipeng  
William Wong, author of Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America and Images of America: Oakland’s Chinatown, was born in the Chinatown in 1941 and spent the first 20 years of his life in the neighborhood. 
Wong now lives in Piedmont, but he makes regular trips back to the Chinatown to meet friends and do shopping. Play the sound slideshow to view the photos and listen to Wong talk about his emotional attachment to the Chinatown.  Click here to visit Wong’s OAKLAND CHINATOWN HISTORY website.

By Mateen Kaul
The United States needs greater economic and diplomatic efforts, rather than just a better military strategy, to improve the situation in Afghanistan, according to Afghans settled in Fremont.

By Guo Shipeng
Li Zhijian was a millionaire in local currency terms before he emigrated to Oakland from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in June.
Like many fresh immigrants in  Chinatown who come to America for a better life but are overwhelmed by cultural and social differences, the 45-year-old former construction contractor is struggling with elementary English classes in an adult school in the hope that he could find a paying job soon.

By Karen Weise
As the economic downturn moved through Silicon Valley, Fremont’s East Indian community struggled with the possibility of returning to India.
Job cuts started hitting Silicon Valley in September, with layoffs from large mainstays like Yahoo and startups like YouSendit emailing services, according to TechCrunch’s Layoff Tracker.

By Adelaide Chen
An older generation of Vietnamese Americans is leaning toward Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain–while their younger counterparts are favoring Barack Obama.
Among Asians in California, Vietnamese are most likely to support McCain, at 53 percent, according to the National Asian American Survey conducted by professors from three universities.

By Adelaide Chen
As a result of ethnic conflict in Bhutan, Damanta Kharel, 25, grew up and attended school in a United Nations camp.  She earned a masters degree commuting from the camp to a nearby college in Nepal.
But as a newly arrived refugee in Oakland, she takes night classes to get a GED.

Story and photos by Tyler Sipe
The tradition of sending funds back home, called remittances, is a longstanding tradition among immigrants living abroad in the U.S. – including in Fremont.  
However, faced with a domestic and global economic downturn, foreign-born immigrants have been forced to tighten their wallets and decrease the amount of money they send back to friends and family in their native countries.