Thursday, March 08, 2007

An Open Letter to my Asian Brothers

Stop embarrassing yourselves on TV! Seriously though, I'd kind of been avoiding this whole Kenneth Eng thing, but poplicks.com had a Fox News video and I couldn't help myself. If you don't know about Kenneth Eng yet,
Poplicks has excellent coverage here and here.

I'm not really going to even touch Kenneth Eng's articles. There's a reason that no one is defending him or his views. After seeing the video of his interview on Fox, my first thought was "Oh great. A wonderful representative of Asian Americans. At least he speaks English fluently, that gives him one up on William Hung." However, his nerdery, obsession with dragons, inability to make eye contact, and antisocial behavior seem to play into some of the worst Asian American male stereotypes.

Throughout the interview, the interviewer kept asking him why he was so angry. Mr. Eng talked a lot about dragons and his views on how dragons related to evolution. At the same time, I'm pretty sure that Kenneth Eng, like William Hung, is going to get much more air time than Jin or John Cho.

At the same time, it seems to me that he sort of taps into a cultural fear that William Hung also played into. They're like caricatures of what people always thought we were, but that we desperately tried to prove we aren't. At the same time, guys like these prove that these stereotypes do exist. There's nothing much we can do about our buffoons and bigots, they will probably continue to make asses of themselves. Just another round of one step forward, five steps back.

8 comments:

Nien said...

yo, leave the asian brothers out of this.

Factorial said...

It... I... that... I... OH MY GOD IS HE FOR REAL????

Dragons??? DRAGONS??!?!?!?!?

Also he has the exact voice that I would have expected him to have. If he were white, I'd swear I was back at Reed and this was written in the Quest.

Maybe... maybe he's being paid by the Klan or something.

Factorial said...

No! Wait! I see it now! He's just trying to sell his books!

Oh. Christ. I'm listening to this right now, without watching it, and I'm possibly going to have a heart attack:

He. Sounds. Like. Cody.

::dies::

lovelesscynic said...

it's good to know that I can still break people's minds. If only from long distance.

lovelesscynic said...

wait, the Knight of the White Lily Flower? Really? If so, that has broken MY mind.

Anonymous said...

He's got Aspergers.

Anonymous said...

i fully understand. i'm going through something sort of similar with alberto the lying sneak gonzales....

lovelesscynic said...

Y'know I'm not sure if I'm grateful or sad. Grateful because at least my embarrassment does not send people to be unlawfully tortured, however sad, because while the GOP thinks they can woo "the Latino vote" with people like Gonzales and Mel Martinez, no Asian is important enough to actually change anything.

Considering the effect that Gonzales has had on this country. I'm particularly fond of all his crimes against humanity for starters, I think I'm grateful.