Tag Archives: apa

The Donger’s legacy

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I missed this NPR report a couple of weeks ago, about the impact of the character Long Duk Dong from the 1980s hit movie, “16 Candles.” I had heard a promo for the report while driving but got home before it came on.

I finally went back to check it out and it’s worth hearing.

The link to the report is at the top of the page; the text on the page is the report’s transcript. Be sure to check out the extra interview clip with Gedde Watanabe, the Japanese American actor who played “the Donger” — he doesn’t really have a clue, unfortunately. And check out the comic that’s included, “Donger and Me.” Continue reading →

Follow-up on University of Colorado’s “war against Asians” Campus Press column

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I’ve never seen Denver’s Asian American community rally so quickly around an issue like they have around the botched satire, “If it’s war the Asians want… It’s war they’ll get“, that ran on the website of The Campus Press, the University of Colorado’s venue for budding journalists.

There’s been a blizzard of emails flying around town from groups and individuals, outraged postings (including mine as well as Joe Nguyen’s commentary on AsiaXpress), and TV and print media news reports.

A collective of APA students who’ve organized a Facebook group called Colorado Asian American Organizations organized a meeting yesterday at Denver University, where about 40 people showed up. Erin attended, and also sent out notices to some of the local media, so there were TV crews from several stations on hand to cover the discussion. Attendees included not just students, but community activists, older APAs and also African Americans and Latinos. Continue reading →

Satire or stupidity?

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I’m always amazed at how young “journalists” can write really stupid stuff and then hide behind the cloak of “satire” to defend themselves. That’s what happened this week, when the University of Colorado’s amateur student news site, CampusPress.com, ran a commentary by Max Karson titled “If it’s war the Asians want… it’s war they’ll get.”

It’s not very well written. It’s self indulgent in an immature, self-possessed manner. It’s confusingly filled with hate language and alarming statements for much of the column, then it veers into surrealism, and suddenly, if you weren’t sure whether it’s supposed to be a joke (I wasn’t), you start to realize it’s not serious. The problem is, so much of it sounds serious, and feels serious, and perpetuates racist stereotypes and statements about Asians that I’ve heard all my life. So why wouldn’t I take it seriously? Continue reading →

Food for thought: Spam and Shoyu

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Two news items worth noting, although one is kinda old already:

First Burger King has announced that in Hawaii, they’re selling a new item, a Spam Platter — two slices of Spam nestled between white rice and scrambled eggs. BK, which is based in Miami, also serves its Croissanwich or Biscuit Sandwich with Spam for the Hawaiian market. Continue reading →

Are Asian Americans affected by Cho Seung-Hui?

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There’s a fascinating discussion going around in the e-mail list for New York chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association. It began the day that news of the Virginia Tech shootings broke, when the media first reported that the shooter may be Asian. Since then, various perspectives have been shared about whether it was journalistically important to identify the race of the shooter (I kinda think it was, considering the tragic scope of the incidents), whether there will be a racial backlash against Asians, and whether Asian Americans share sense of guilt and shame about the murders. Continue reading →