Q: How many medals did the USA take home from the Sochi Olympics?

A: 28. (AABANY guessed 84.)

Q: What was Google’s former name?

A: Backrub. (Yeah, AABANY was stumped and slightly grossed out.)

Q: What was the most important lesson that AABANY learned after a long hard-fought battle among 14 teams at the AAJA Trivia Bowl on May 15?

A: Believe in each other.

The team consisted of 10 members: Yang Chen, Simone Nguyen, Linda Lin, William Wang, Francis Chin, Steven Shapiro, Gary Malone, Rio Guerrero, Gabriel Arce-Yee, and Ligee Gu. Executive Director Yang Chen acted as Team Captain and Linda Lin acted as scribe. Leezel Tanglao pf the Asian American Journalists Association of New York organized the event and Agnes Chung and Ti-Hua Chang acted as MCs. The evening’s events were sponsored by Buick and Fairway. Read the whole list of sponsors here and the social media highlights from #AAJATriviaBowl here.

The Trivia Bowl took place on May 15 at the Broad Street Ballroom, in the Financial District. The competition consisted of five rounds. The topic for round 1 was the 1980s. Round 2 was Women’s Firsts, round 3 was Current Events, round 4 was Pop Culture and round 5 was World Views. Each round consisted of 12 questions for a total of 60 questions. Each team would complete an answer sheet for each round. The sheets were then collected and delivered to the judging panel for marking.

The judging panel consisted of sitting APA judges in New York: Hon. Doris Ling Cohan, Hon. Lydia Lai, Hon. Lillian Wan, Hon. John Lansden and Hon. Leslie Purificacion.

Before the event, fearless leader Yang Chen warned teammates not to drink alcohol and compromise the mental acuity necessary to pull ahead in the race. These instructions went unheeded.

AABANY was off to a rocky start at AAJA’s Third Annual Trivia Bowl, matched against different news and Asian American community organizations. Despite the team’s initial optimism in seeing the 1980s category (hopefully that doesn’t date too many people), AABANY trailed the news organizations after the first round, coming in sixth place, an embarrassing spot to be in after remembering the near-victory against the New York Times back in 2012. Read more about that here.

However, as the underdog, we climbed up the ranks in the second round (third place!) and third rounds (second place!) only to have a soul-crushing fourth round (fifth place tied with AALDEF – but does what happened in the 1960s really count as Current Events?). Even Yang had succumbed to the allure of Tiger Beer by that point. That last and final round was a redemption process played out in slow motion as Ti-Hua read off the questions to the once-jittering now-tense room.

Gabe is great at geography. Who knew?

We should have listened to Ligee! Ligee knows not only where Lupita Nyongo, 12 Years A Slave, went to school (Yale School of Drama) but also correctly recalled the leader of China during the Tiananmen Square demonstration in 1989 (Deng Xiaoping). 

Simone Nguyen takes the Team Spirit Award.

Gary Malone takes the MVP Award.

Both Francis Chin and Will Wang took home prizes as winners of the raffle: Will Wang won what was characterized as a box of stuff (it included cookbooks!) while Francis Chin took home a case of Tiger Beer! 

Francis was the only person to put in a raffle ticket for the Corky Lee recreation photograph, taken May 10, correcting the exclusion of Asian Americans in the Golden Spike photograph commemorating the finish of the Transcontinental Railroad. Francis voluntarily withdrew his ticket so that the historic photo could be auctioned off instead. Ti-Hua, using his best auctioneer voice, raised $300. 

By the end of the evening, Team AABANY, dubbed “The TrivBowlers” by fearless leader Yang Chen, was glad to have rallied over the course of the night and was honored to come in second place overall.

Congratulations to ABC News on their second victory in a row! AABANY was able to redeem ourselves by topping New York Times, victors (usurpers) of AABANY’s first trivia bowl, but we’ll have to try again next year to unseat the reigning champions at ABC.

Congratulations and thank you to AAJA for throwing such a suspenseful event and raising thousands of dollars in scholarships, stipends and fellowship programs to benefit journalism students and professionals!