Are you planning on describing me as (A) not what you'd expect, (B) surprisingly pretty, (C) a rarity, or (D) all of the above?
Will you be emphasizing my Womanly Attributes? (A) Yes, (B) Yes, in detail, or (C) Yes, in detail, with references to giggles and cupcakes.
Will you also explain how technology has unsexed me? (A) Yes, (B) Yes, while simultaneously infantilizing you, you "geeky super-normal enthusiastic girl"!
Are you planning to include intimations that I slept my way to the top? (A) Yes, (B) No, just an attribution of your success to Powerful Male Associates. Who you probably slept with.
Will you end by asking when I'm going to give up all these crazy ideas and go back to full-time Womanhood? (A) Yes, (B) Yes, because you scare the boys.
Warning - there's a particularly nasty troll in the comments, but the other commenters, male and female alike, make short work of him.
Many non-Asian American people of color indulge the common fantasy that Asian Americans as a group do not suffer from American racism. For these pitiful anonymous, Asian Americans as a group have so ingratiated themselves into White supremacist America that the phrase ‘model minority myth’ has become a hollow throwaway from the arrogantly underprivileged towards those they consider lucky at best, and unimportant usually.
Personally, I found this phenomena most prevalent during my Cornell days where, from my perspective, the most international and ethnically diverse Ivy League university in this nation never once encouraged intense dialogue within its student body on multiculturalism and diversity. Now, the campus operated daily with those buzzwords; even the Campus Life residence hall directors and building managers and cafeteria workers and janitors attended monotonous meetings without end designed to indoctrinate cross-cultural unity perspectives in every facet of student life, all to little effect.
‘Multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’, like their precursor ‘integration’, serve one purpose: to convince young scions of the privileged and alienated majority that people of color matter enough to their personal and professional lives that basic social interaction between the races must emerge to preserve the Establishment. This interaction, social sometimes but financial usually, is literally the only way the iconic institutions of the United States of America - our imperiled dollar, our vaunted ingenuity, our inhuman military supremacy - can thrive amid the real and imagined geopolitical Katrinas of the Twenty-First Century - an international energy crisis, global warming, stateless terrorism, welfare state financial meltdown, etc. Leave it to academia to decipher Ben Franklin’s handwriting on the dusty walls of our nationally forgotten past — after a building takeover best described as a bastardized hybrid between passionate student activism and the death of liberalism itself shocks Cayuga’s genius into paying attention.
The point? In balkanized liberal America, no one offers guidance on race to those the majority expects to teach. At Cornell, one on my favorite sayings was “I don’t get paid to be your professional Negrologist, and I wouldn’t cash that check if you offered.” (I’m obviously paraphrasing; this is a family blog.) But I’m convinced - then and now - that a major reason so many non-Asian American people of color express ambivalence and/or outright contempt for the racialized plight of Asian Americans derives from the unchallenged concept that Asian Americans are all smart, wealthy, hardworking, and too polite to cause trouble. What’s more, in the absence of consensus among Asian Americans on the political worth of the model minority myth, many non-Asians indulge a defensive antagonism toward Asian American politics, one that excludes Asian Americans from much of the anti-racism activism in this country.
Even in 2008, when national media covers a race story, it involves the senseless murder of an African American teenager in Los Angeles, or Newark, or Washington D.C. It involves the influx of undocumented workers from our porous southern border who wish for nothing more from this country than to work hard at backbreaking labor in exploitative plantation conditions just to provide the rest of us with cheap lettuce (and benefit from the American welfare state, of course). Race in America involves the vision of an untried and brilliant biracial Senator who offers national unity — wearing racial absolution’s summer Sean John — to mainstream White America, and the automatically beneath contempt sermons of his respected and beloved pastor, immortalized after decades of spiritual and political service to the Chicago African American community as a frothing, rabid throwback of a forgotten era when Whites were a silent majority and Blacks like the good Reverend deserved the water hoses and German shepherds for ’stirrin’ up the good Negroes’.
Mind you - nowhere in our current race dialogue can Asian Americans speak about themselves. Nowhere.
And frankly, we lose something important this way, when some people of color, usually African Americans, are always called on to discuss themselves. America defines race dialogue today as teaching White people the specific racial etiquette necessary to never under any circumstances allow a person of color to detect their individual racism or their individual benefits from the institutional racism constructed by Whites past, and to prevent any real racial dialogue at any time for any reason that any White person must engage and/or respect. When people of color employ this dynamic publicly, I consider it selling melanin, and we should never forget that the whole world lines up for this new-age auction block. Just ask Juan Williams. And Boyce Watkins, for that matter.
None of us gain encouragement to look beyond our own racial or ethnic or gendered or economic oppressions in this country. Between reality television’s faux-documentary visual immediacy where Viacom cameras offer a behind-the-scenes gaze on twenty-two year old oiled, muscular Caucasoid cavemen who consume enough Budweiser in thirty minutes to piss alcohol throughout the insipid physical challenges that offer money and prestige to the moronic and pathetic, between popular music’s endless parade of gaudy, half-naked thirty-plus songstresses still begging you the consumer to inject the mountains of China White necessary to believe the Duchess is only twenty-five (and could ever sing), between the ever-present U.S. Marines recruitment commercials featuring all the dirt and grime and explosions a Santa Monica sound stage can glean from wartime Tikrit footage and a Puddle of Mudd single, between the self-centered rappers who devolve Black masculinity amid urban blight into bulging muscles glistening with baby oil and meaningless beefs over money, ‘hoes and clothes to replace lyrical content with insipid controversy, between the cable-news pundits who sell introverted xenophobia and unapologetic racism in a folksy Main Street cadence ripped from President Ronald Reagan himself, the master at hate-your-neighbor politics, between the Ferraro feminists who despise Sambo success in exactly that language and hate their own booty shorts-clad Obama Girl daughters in the New York Times Sunday opinion page and the Wright “revolutionaries” who bellow and scream and screech over a basic Fuck Whitey! speech so they can gather the strength to serve Missy Anne Ferraro in our modern corporate big house with the marble tile and wood-grain tables and plasma screen televisions in the slave quarters’ break room — between all the insanity living in America generates the Millennium Generation has progressed into the All About Me! Generation, and our anemic politics panic at the disco.
Progressed, not evolved. A new study lays waste the claim that all Asian Americans are wealthy enough to afford healthcare in this nation, and that Asian American healthcare concerns do not exist. Pockets of economic uncertainty derived from small business ownership have left the rates of healthcare insurance ownership abysmally low for Korean Americans, and this study provides much more incentive for Americans to elect a President concerned with slashing the exorbitant costs from our current system while we push for universal healthcare. Also, this study encourages our nation to stop treating people as if they emerge from monolithic, homogenized groups. Poverty and lack of access to healthcare exists among us all, even the so-called model minorities among us, and a concerted focus on the specific groups affected by these problems, whether inner-city African Americans, immigrant Mexican Americans, small-business owning Korean Americans or working poor Native Hawaiians, would in my opinion, go a long way towards crafting and executing needed solutions, while all of us learn to look at each other without typecasting.
And we’d better: I work for a political campaign right now, and I don’t have insurance. I can’t afford it.
This is just truly disgusting. MadTV aired a sketch entitled “Under Barack Obama”, which is a spoof of Rihanna’s “Umbrella”. In it, Keegan-Michael Key plays Barack Obama while Nicole Parker plays Hillary Clinton, who has caught that jungle fever.
The music video is rife with stereotypes that play on fears of Black male candidates’ sexual conquest of White women. Who can forget the devastating effect this RNC-sponsored ad had on Harold Ford’s campaign for the Senate? The ad functioned to associate Ford’s name not only with the rampant sexuality of a Playboy mansion party, but with fears of a Black man’s sexual predation on White femininity.
MadTV’s sketch takes the political discourse to the lowest common denominator, devolving two key candidates into stereotypes based on their minority status. Hillary Clinton can’t possibly be a viable candidate: she’s only in it to ensnare a man and wreak bloody vengeance on her husband’s infidelity, while Obama is re-cast as nothing more than a walking, rapping phallus.
Moreover, the sketch suggests an imbalance in the sanctity of Black versus White marriage; whereas Clinton indicates that the proposed tryst in the music video is in response to Bill Clinton’s affair, the adultery of the Obama caricature is unreferenced — as if Black men are so hypersexualized that it’s hardly shocking for him to bed the seemingly willing and eager Hillary.
MadTV, I support Bobby Lee just like the next Asian American gal, but you have officially jumped the shark. Officially.
Yeah, so gossip blogs aren’t exactly known for their sensitivity — although several were quick to jump on chastising Rosie O’Donnell for her “ching-chong”, they were just as quick to mock her size and her homosexuality in doing so. So, it’s not as if we’re really looking to gossip blogs to model sensitivity towards oppressed groups.
However, that’s still no excuse to make racist jokes against us or any other group.
These pictures were labeled “Katherine Heigl is a bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding in Santa Monica Oct. 7″ and, um…uhhh…did I miss something? How did the soldier that Gilligan found become Katherine Heigl’s sister? Does she still think it’s WWII? Man, I hope not. I’m just gonna take a wild stab and say that they have different parents. Either that or a Japanese hooker called Mrs. Heigl with a secret. Oh Mr. Heigl, you naughty boy.
Mmmm. Nothing like the taste of Japanese hooker jokes first thing in the morning to get your day started. First of all, it’s not even clear that the woman in the picture is Japanese — it’s clear she’s East Asian, but there are more East Asian ethnicities out there than Japanese or Japanese American.
And even if she is Japanese or Japanese American, what’s with the WWII jokes? The hooker jokes? The “Oh My God — what is that?!?” references — as if East Asian people are OMGLOLWTF! SO. FUCKIN’. WEIRD. And of course, there’s no way that Ms. Heigl’s sister could possibly be an Asian adoptee, a half-sister, or a hapa following a second marriage. No, she simply must be the perpetually foreign, bastard child of a slutty Japanese hooker displaced through time from World War II. How totally Miss Saigon.
To quote Angry Asian Man, that’s racist!
(Not to mention that the next paragraph of the post is just plain sandbox mean against one of the other bridesmaids. I felt like I was losing IQ points just having my browser pointed at this page. Since when did humour really have to cater to the lowest common denominator?)
To give this moronic blogger a piece of your mind, email Editor@IDontLikeYouInThatWay.com. As always, feel free to post a copy of your letter in the comments of this post.
Photos on photo sharing sites like Flickr.com or Photobucket.com just might appear on billboards somewhere halfway across the globe.
That’s what happened to an Asian American girl named Alison Chang. Her friend (screenname chewywong) took this picture of her while she was at a church barbeque:
The photo was then posted on chewywong’s Flickr account. Incidentally, chewywong has over 680 pages of photos, suggesting to me that this man is the visual archivist of this little group of church-going Asian American youths.
Then Virgin Mobile Australia entered the picture. After finding Alison’s photo on Flickr, they created a billboard ad campaign, including her photo (without her permission) in this ad:
Alison never gave her permission to be in this ad campaign. And certainly not in an ad campaign that depends so heavily on the Perpetual Foreigner stereotype, implying that she is some sort of foreign, geeky Asian penpal who couldn’t possibly be a citizen of a Westernized country. Wrote one person on chewywong’s Flickr account:
What people don’t seem to get here is, they are obviously using stereotype by randomly choosing any Asian girl, and think she is some Japanese schoolgirl that would have a pen pal in Australia. When in in fact she is a normal American citizen that has her photo up on the web. We all know that we ourselves have written a letter to our Japanese counterparts, but not all penpals are Asian! Especially with her little peace sign thrown up, they take one look and say, “Oh, a typical Japanese schoolgirl!” I would not like it if I was walking down the street and people would look at me as their penpal. In fact I hate writing letters.
Advertising is all about what the viewer thinks when they see the advertisement, and in this case, the advertisement depicts Alison as some sort of reviled Asian nerd and social outcast, who a cool Westernized Australian wouldn’t possibly want to keep as a penpal because now they have text messaging and can text their Australian (i.e. not Asian) friends!
Interestingly, this ad is part of a series of ads that have pulled images from private Flickr accounts. However, as shown in this blog post, most of the other ads feature images where the faces of the people in question are non-distinct. Only the ad featuring Alison shows her unobscured face, which begs the question as to why they felt comfortable using Alison’s photo for a rather denigrating ad text, while protecting the identities of their other “models”.
Alison’s family has filed a lawsuit against Virgin Mobile for the ads, after failing to hear from the company responsible for the ads. For more information, you can follow this discussion or check out the CNN report here.
I missed the news last week that Whoopi Goldberg’s debut on The View marked the return of anti-Asian humour to the show, but thanks has to go out to reader Christal Phillips, who emailed me to let me know of an article she wrote for East West Magazine, documenting the incident.
It seems that last week, Whoopi marked her first day on The View by defending Michael Vick’s recent dogfighting troubles, citing Vick’s cultural roots in the Deep South. Whoopi likened dogfighting in the South with cockfighting in Puerto Rico, and then — in a comment that seems to be surreptitiously edited out of all of the YouTube clips of that day — Whoopi apparently said:
“It’s like the Chinese. They have a different relationship to cats. And you and I would be really pissed if somebody ate kitty.”
‘Scu me?
No really, I mean, ’scu me?
My anger over this sentiment is only compounded by the fact that it also makes no sense to me in the context of her argument. Is she citing a supposed cavalier attitude Asians have towards cats and dogs, or is she citing American hypersensibilities when it comes to not only their domesticated animals as well as the cultural imperialism associated with passing judgement on another culture’s take on acceptable treatment of said animals?
Of course, it’s likely that this is a pithy statement desired to engender a cheap laugh. And therein lies the rub: why is it that, again, The View’s moderator finds it acceptable to lighten the mood by playing off of anti-Asian stereotypes?
Now, don’t get it twisted. I’m a big fan of Whoopi Goldberg, and I also don’t think she’s wrong when it comes to Michael Vick. After all, isn’t it interesting how quickly the media was willing to jump at the supposed barbarism of a Black man when it comes to animal cruelty, basically lynching him in the public eye? Hypocrisy in this story abounds — Vick is certainly not the first or only person who has engaged in dogfighting in America, and yet Americans salivate at his ongoing punishment for a crime he really might not have realized was illegal. And while Electroman recounts his observation of ”Neuter Michael Vick” t-shirts during his last trip to Virginia, no one seems to be discussing the fact that all of Michael Vick’s dogs have been euthanized; in other words, no animal lives were saved in the making of this controversy.
However, that doesn’t excuse Whoopi’s statement. Phillips muses in her East West article:
The day after Whoopi’s debut, the only news sources I found that wrote any commentary on the Chinese-eating-cats comment were Asian American blogs “Angry Asian Man” and “Hyhpen” magazine’s blog. It continues to amaze me how often people can get away with putting down Asian culture without having to apologize or recognize their ignorance. Maybe that problem can someday be solved once we have more Asians included in
America’s “View”.
Yes, currently, it’s “okay” to put down Asian culture by drawing on dehumanizing, comedic stereotypes. But we need to make it not “okay”. We need to unite and take action.
Part of it is spreading the word, and hopefully you’ve done your part by reading the posts cited above and this one, and telling your APIA friends what Whoopi has done. And part of it is taking the fight to them. You can start by asking The View whether Whoopi plans on apologizing for her anti-Asian statement and whether or not she plans to continue the trend of anti-Asian humour initiated by her predecessor, Rosie “I’m a Racist” O’Donnell.
It was immediately obvious from the trailer that Chuck and Larry was yet another in a long string of mainstream films intended to play off of stereotypes to engender a laugh.
The movie stars Adam Sandler and Kevin James as two heterosexual firemen who enter into a faux-domestic partnership in order to help James’ character transfer his pension benefits to his children. Universal Pictures decided to approach marketing the film by condensing as many anti-gay jokes as possible into the trailer as possible:
In the wake of the Isaiah Washington fiasco which resulted in a heightened sensitivity surrounding use of anti-gay slurs, it’s surprising to me that Chuck and Larry was lauded by prominent activist groups. Defending multiple uses of “fag” and similar anti-gay humour in the film, a spokesman for GLAAD said:
“Through this disarming type of comedy, there is this use of stereotypes and slurs, and it holds the mirror up for people to ask, ‘Where does this come from?’ ” Romine said.
“At the end of the day, this is a comedy that actually stresses the importance of family and treating others with dignity and respect. The film actually does send a very strong message.
A lesser publicized but equally weighty concern over this film, however, is its prominent use of yellowface for Rob Schneider’s (surprisingly) uncredited role as the minister who weds Chuck and Larry. Schneider’s scenes are within a few seconds of the trailer embedded above.
Bearing a stereotypical mushroom cut, bucked teeth, jaundiced skin, and glasses reminscent of Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Schneider plays up the ‘r/l’ slurs and stilted “Chingrish” typically used to mock recent Asian immigrants. Below is an image from the Official Chuck and Larry website:
MANAA has already come out against Chuck and Larry, specifically citing Schneider’s repeated dependence on race-based stereotypes to obtain a cheap laugh:
MANAA Blasts Rob Schneider For Offensive Racial Caricature in Chuck & Larry Movie
LOS ANGELES-MANAA (the Media Action Network for Asian Americans), the only organization solely dedicated to monitoring the media and advocating balanced, sensitive, and positive coverage and depictions of Asian Americans, is offended by Rob Schneider’s “yellow face” portrayal of a Japanese man in the current #1 movie in the country, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James.
In a scene where the main characters journey to Canada to get married, Schneider plays a minister who makes their union official, donning prosthetic make up (slanted eyes, bigger nose, darker skin color, etc.) to play a stereotypical Japanese nerd with thick eye-glasses and a bowl-style hair cut who speaks in broken English with missing “r”s.
Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “I felt victimized by the stereotype shtick of … Schneider.” And Emmy-nominated actor Masi Oka (“Heroes”) told USA Today he was also offended by the yellow-face portrayal. Says MANAA Founding President Guy Aoki, “In August of 2006, shortly after Mel Gibson’s tirade against Jews, Schneider, pointing out he was half Jewish, took out a full page ad in Daily Variety promising to never work with the writer/director/actor. We wish Rob had the same pride about being part-Asian. Somehow, we don’t think he’d make the same assertion against someone who spouted anti-Asian hatred because the actor has himself done quite a good job of putting down people of Asian descent. As Richard Roeper of ‘Ebert and Roeper’ recently said in his review of Chuck and Larry, ‘Rob Schneider’s Filipino background [he’s a quarter] hardly excuses his portrayal of an Asian minister in perhaps the most egregious stereotype of its kind since Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’”
Rob Schneider also repeatedly perpetuated the tired stereotype that Asian men have small penises in a 2005 movie he co-wrote, Deuce Bigalo: European Gigolo” (e.g. an Asian male prostitute says in broken English, “I no more man-whore! Too much danger! I take my three inches elsewhere!”).
Besides an Asian American fireman who gets no lines, the only other Asian faces we see in Chuck and Larry are five Asian women who come out of a van wearing Hooters-like clothes to “pleasure” Chuck (Sandler) and who’re later seen “having fun” with each other while waiting for Chuck to come back to bed. “Therefore,” Aoki points out, “the impression people get from watching this film is that Asian men are disgusting-looking geeks and that Asian women are sluts.”
“Sandler showed his movie to GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and edited out scenes they deemed offensive because he didn’t want to make a movie that would offend the gay community. He should’ve shown it to MANAA; we would’ve had quite a few things to say to him (MANAA has consulted with studios about their films, including Rising Sun and Pearl Harbor).” MANAA is reachable at manaaletters@hotmail.com, (213) 486-4433, and P.O. Box 11105/Burbank, CA 91510.
# # # #
It was immediately obvious from the trailer that Chuck and Larry was yet another in a long string of mainstream films intended to play off of stereotypes to engender a laugh.
Although defenders of Schneider will invariably cite his part-Filipino heritage, anti-racist activists are keenly aware that membership in a particular racial identity hardly excuses racist behaviour. Consider, after all, Lucy Liu’s and Bai Ling’s repeated acceptance of roles which has them playing up the stereotypes of the hypersexualized, objectified Asian female. For Schneider to continually resort to anti-Asian humour only emphasizes his lack of comedic talent and the need for him to exit the stage, post-haste.
Meanwhile, Chuck and Larry furthers stereotypes not just against Asian males, but also against Asian American females. In a scene involving five Hooter’s girls, the films producers cast all five as Asian females — including Tila Tequila who achieved online infamy for her salacious photos. These five women are later involved in a sexually explicit scene with one another, for the benefit of our White male protagonists, perpetuating the stereotype of Asian American women as sexual accessories existing purely for the gratification of White America.
That the mainstream media has not picked up on the APIA community’s outrage against Chuck and Larry suggests to me that we have not done enough to signal our disgust. I encourage you to write Letters to the Editor in your local entertainment news sources, documenting the anti-Asian nature of this film. Further, you can contact Universal Pressure and express your displeasure using this form.
As always, if you intend on writing a letter, please feel free to re-post a copy in the comments of this thread to help us document the actions being taken.
I feel dirty. Very, very dirty. You see, I just watched the trailer for Bai Ling’s new movie: Shanghai Baby.
Let’s play a drinking game. First, make sure you’re not at work: this trailer is most definitely NSFW. Then, pour yourself some alcohol. And then, take a drink every time you see:
Bai Ling being sexy/flirty/coy with a man (1 shot)
Bai Ling having sex (2 shots)
Bai Ling’s nipples (2 shots per nipple)
Bai Ling orgasming (just down the bottle)
Be careful — that level of alcohol in your bloodstream will make you go blind. But then again, maybe that would be preferable to actually seeing this travesty:
The idea — the very concept — that anyone would make a movie version of Shanghai Baby is completely revolting to me. This movie is yet another vehicle for Bai Ling to perpetuate the hypersexualized Asian whore stereotype for salivating American male audiences, although, frankly, I’m just about done with Bai Ling’s sexuality spilling all over the screen. Don’t get me wrong — it is certainly empowering for an Asian woman to seize control of her sexuality, but a) this movie is all about how CoCo hasn’t seized control over her sexuality, and b) I’m done with the unchanging portrayal of Asian/Asian American women as the nymphomaniacs of the world.
And that’s just scratching the surface of this film’s plot. It’s no coincidence that one of only two lines of dialogue in the trailer are Coco’s friend asking her who she would pick: Tiantian or Marc. That’s the entire plot! Coco is a freelance writer, but the plot doesn’t worry itself about her life and her independence — no, this is a book about a woman who falls in love with an Asian man but lusts for a White man. And her life falls apart because she can’t have them both.
Yes, her life — her very being — revolves around the men in her life. This film takes the whole “whore” stereotype to the next level, with a story about an Asian woman who is so motivated by her attraction to a White man that she willingly puts her career on hold to pursue a role as his mistress, uncaring that he obviously has a family of his own.
Coco leads an intense life in the lively subculture of the boomtown Shanghai. It revolves around endless nights spent in the Shanghai club and art scene, sex, literature and the writing of her first novel.
Her life takes an unexpectedly complicated turn when she suddenly feels attracted to two very opposite men.
One is the young Chinese artist Tiantian, a melancholic and sensitive painter with a complicated family history. He leads the live of a true bohemian, sustained by the money his mother sends from abroad.
In their quest for art and beauty they are soulmates. Coco develops feelings of exceptional tenderness for him. He seems to be her ideal love.
Marc from Berlin is completely different: masculin, physically very attractive, he is an internationally active business consultant who begins a passionate affair with Coco.
Coco is torn between her love for Tiantian and Mark‘s physical attractiveness – even when she learns that he is already married, has a child and will possibly return to Berlin.
Coco briefly succeeds in experiencing both lust and love with the same intensity. But when the melancholy Tiantian ultimately sinks into heroin addiction and progressively deteriorates, Coco‘s dilemma comes to a head.
She is caught between Far-Eastern traditions and Western lifestyles, between romantic love and unbridled lust. Too late she discovers that she has succumbed to Mark. Lossing both men and without any stable orientation, she errs through modern-day Shanghai, and only on a trip to Berlin she can recover herself.
Check out the same tired race-based stereotypes perpetuated by the men in this film. Tiantian is the Asian male: hopelessly romantic, sensitive, and devoted — the very antithesis of Hollywood masculinity (whether you agree with this definition or not). He’s so pathetically in love with Coco that when he can’t have her, he becomes addicted to heroin. Marc, on the other hand, is the aggressive, handsome, attractive, dominating White male Adonis fantasy, sweeping Coco off her feet with his libido. He uses and discards Coco to satisfy his own sexual appetities. If that’s not playing into the White male sexual fantasies of American audiences of this film, I don’t know what is.
There was a time when I was enraptured by Bai Ling. Here was a woman willing to stand up to her country in order to help tell the story of government oppression in Red Corner. I thought that was pretty courageous. But y’know what? I’m done — just done — with trying to imagine feminism in her antics.
Everywhere I turn now, she’s selling her sexuality for bit roles in films that only sully her race and her sex, and in so doing, sullies all who happen to share those identities with her. Excuse me, but I need a shower.
So, last night, I watched Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth installment in the Die Hard series. And, it was phenomenal. This film hearkened back to the original action film genre — it was a trip back to a time when action flicks were about overblown plots, compelling, megalomaniacal villains, and a lone hero performing impossible feats to blow a hell of a lot of shit up.
The action movie genre has been all but forgotten in today’s America. I can’t remember the last good action flick I saw where most of the movie was involved in destroying things. They say that Hollywood reflects politics — so, I wonder if the recent trend of fantasy epics replacing nitty, gritty action movies might not have something to do with the American public’s need for easy escapism from the horrors of today’s real-life wars.
But, Live Free or Die Hard is certainly giving a middle finger to all that, and trying to resurrect the good ‘ol action flicks of yore. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen John McClane blow a helicopter up with a car. Yes, folks — he blew a helicopter up. With a car. And that occurs early in the movie, and it only hints at an even more unlikely contest between two man-made vehicles.
That’s not to say that Live Free or Die Hard was perfect. Yes, I loved Bruce Willis as John McClane (Demi Moore, you chose Ashton Kutcher over that?!?), and Tim Olyphant was totally creepy as the villain of the piece (and it helps that I just came out of a Deadwood marathon, so it was really weird to see Olyphant playing a twisted bad guy). Justin Long is his usual funny self playing that same computer nerd he plays in everything he’s ever been in. Kevin Smith makes a pretty funny cameo, and they could have edited in a 30-second clip of Sung Kang doing nothing but making a peanut butter sandwich on camera and I would’ve thought he was fabulous.
But, I really could’ve done without Maggie Q.
Maggie Q’s contributions to the dastardly plot are:
To be the villain’s girlfriend
To have a sexy voice
To wear completely impractical stiletto heels to go on a dangerous villainous mission
To use kung fu to attempt to kick McClane’s butt
Obviously, she fails at #4, or this wouldn’t be a Die Hard movie. But following her untimely death, the movie engages in four or five completely unnecessary, teeth-grittingly painful quips by McClane about “hot Asian ninja hookers”.
Yes, I know, it was intended to rile up Tim Olyphant’s character. But it wasn’t much fun to sit in an theatre full of folks laughing at the dead Asian hooker jokes. This movie would’ve been just fine without all of the racial humour.
But, hey. At least it’s not Rush Hour 3. I saw the trailer for the newest Rush Hour right before Live Free or Die Hard, and let me just say: what a disaster! Brett Ratner just needs to stop.
Talk about a mish-mash of offensive stereotypes. Once again, Chris Tucker plays the hypersexual man-child. Jackie Chan is the emasculated Asian buffoon with no street smarts. And Youki Kudoh (I think) is cast as the most unabashed “dragon lady” stereotype we’ve seen in awhile, complete with:
Trying to use her sexuality to lure a male hero into a trap
Wielding a whole heck of a lot of bladed weaponry to kill said male hero
Having a man-hating streak / being hellbent on castrating said male hero (as evidenced by her bladed weapon missing male hero and hitting a painting of a man in the groin)
Wearing a black and gold chi pao with an embroidered dragon on it. Subtle.
Oh yeah, and let’s not even get started on that scene with Chris Tucker doing the same tired bit about “funny Asian names”. I know, I know — no one’s surprised that Rush Hour 3 is an offensive piece of drivel. But can we still call for a nationwide boycott anyways?
I’d much rather spend my movie money on Transformers. It’s more than meets the eye.
So, I don’t know who the hell Chelsea Handler is, but here is her official site, her MySpace, and her Wikipedia article. Apparently, she is a comedian and the host of a new celebrity gossip/talk show. She and Robin Williams were guests on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno when Handler, mocking Angelina Jolie’s newly adopted Vietnamese child, Pax Thien, joked that Pax probably didn’t know he was Asian yet, let alone a bad driver or could do nails really well. Robin Williams chimed in with a bad Asian accent, saying something unintelligible about homework.
It’s this kind of idle racism that most widely affects Asian Americans. Without missing a beat, Williams and Handler were able to take Pax’s race and slide into casually insidious stereotypes of Asian peoples, notably that of the Perpetual Foreigner. And even as the jokes were being made, both celebrities and Leno ridiculed the idea of an Asian American politic backlashing against the comments. They were neither afraid nor caring that Asian Americans might make a stink over these racist remarks, nor that Asian American celebrities and citizens might boycott either Chelsea Handler’s show or The Tonight Show for not challenging Handler’s statements.
If only we could prove them wrong. If you would like to write a comment to Handler, I suggest starting with a MySpace comment. Hopefully someone will be able to dig up some real contact information for her in the meanwhile.
Update (6/21): Please post in the comments if you are aware of any campaigns against Chelsea Handler regarding the remarks on The Tonight Show. Also, please post any contact information that you are aware of.
If you would like to get involved, here are some ways you can do it:
Chelsea Handler is represented by agents at Super Artists, Inc., and her MySpace indicates that her agent is Rich Super. You can contact him at rich@superartists.com, or you can phone the company at (310) 395-1113 or fax them at (310) 395-1136. Snail mail can be sent to 2910 Main St., 2nd Flr, Santa Monica, CA, 90405.
