An Open Letter to All Asian Actors and Directors Who Come to the US

Go home! Stop making crappy and embarrassing movies! Like Cradle 2 The Grave and The Tuxedo or Miami Vice! They will only give you roles that make you look like a Chinaman. You will always play the bad guy, or the guy who has to die. They will only give you the lead if you can do kung fu, and even if you do play the lead, it is highly probably that the other leading role will be starring Tom Arnold. Or, if you are a lady, you will have to take off all your clothes for the white dude, or do kung fu, or both! And it's equally possible that you will also have to die.

The Asian Diaspora is pretty widespread. There are tons of Asian Americans and Asian Canadians who go back to Asia to become stars. All of them speak English, fluently! (Daniel Wu, Edison Chen, Wang Leehom, Nicholas Xie, the LA Boyz etc.)

The big thing about these Asian stars who want to be crossovers (Jet Li, Jackie Chan, Jay Chou, Chow Yun Fat, Ken Watanabe, Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi, Rain, Utada Hikaru) is that none of them can speak English. And that's the reason given as to why they can't succeed.

There are Asian stars who can speak fluent English because they were born in the West. And y'know, they're never the ones who want to try their luck there. You know why? Because they know better.

An open letter to Mako

You are, for better or for worse, one of the most famous Japanese American actors. Yessiree, Korean Americans have John Cho and Sung Kang, Jacqueline Kim, Sandra Oh, Chinese Americans have...Edison Chen...(actually he's Canadian) Perry Shen, and Bai Ling, Lucy Liu (I'd rather have Edison). South Asians have Kal Penn, Filipinos have Dante Basco (aka, that kid who played Rufio in Hook) and we have you and Pat Morita, and Gedde Watanabe. Rock on.

I still remember one of my friends in high school trying to convince me to see Pearl Harbor with her. "No, Mako is in it."
"Oh, no he's really good."
"Let me guess, he plays the Japanese gardener."
"How did you know?"
"Oh, just a feeling."

I have to admit I was actually kind of relieved when you died, because you would stop embarrassing us with appearances in movies like Pearl Harbor, and any Asian American major motion picture known to God.

However I have recently learned that before your passing you did voicework on the new Teenage Ninja Turtles movie that was released recently. I thought you would stop embarrassing us once you died.

I was wrong.

P. S. I thought you were ok in The Wash.

An Open Letter to my Neighbors

New Year is over. Stop lighting firecrackers off already. It's been a month.

p.s. and your karaoke singing, while not overtly offensive is also not entirely welcome.

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.

An Open Letter

An Open Letter to that Dude in the Neighboring Building Who Hawks Up Phlegm at 4 in the Morning,

You have some impressive vocal power. Not only do I hear the hawk, in all its moist detail, the sound of the spit actually echoes throughout the neighboring buildings.

Also, why are you up at 4 in the morning hawking up phlegm anyway? Either quit smoking or drink some hot water, dude. The present state of affairs really isn't working out for you.

An open letter to the man who fishes in the canal by my house

Please, for the love of God, stop fishing there! It smells like a sewer and the fish you're trying to catch are carp which are bottom feeders for Christ sake. I hope for your sake that you're just catching fish for fun and then letting them go. However, when you bring a cooler, I start to suspect it's not just for your bait. Just don't go selling them to any restaurants.