A Bad Week for Asian Americans Gets Worse

It’s been a lousy 10 days for Asian Americans. Last Monday, 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 of his fellow students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the media were quick to try and link the shootings to Asian movies by directors Park Chan-Wook and John Woo. That same day, the Ed Lover radio show on Power 105 aired a comedy skit called “Are You Smarter than an Asian?” featuring questions like “How does an Asian pronounce ‘fried rice’?” On Sunday, “The Sopranos” featured a quiet Asian-American resident of Uncle Junior’s mental hospital who turned out to be a violent psychopath. And this coming Friday, you can watch “The Condemned,” a new action movie featuring a sadistic Japanese martial artist who burns a rival to death.At a time when a Stepin Fetchit descendant, Uncle Ben, is being remade as a corporate CEO, it seems incongruous that Christopher Walken will be donning “yellow face” to play a Fu Manchu clone named Feng in the forthcoming dire-looking comedy “Balls of Fury.” When Don Imus can get fired for saying “nappy headed hos,” how can Ed Lover stay on the air with “Are You Smarter than an Asian?”“We’re a convenient minority,” said Greg Chang, the manager of operations at the ImaginAsian theater, a Manhattan cinema that screens exclusively Asian fare. “A comedian can make fun of Asian Americans and seem edgy without running much risk. Or a school can point to their Asian students and say that they have a lot of minority students even if they don’t have any African-Americans enrolled.”Max Han, who runs the Korean news site NewYorkSeoul.com, points to the emphasis placed on Cho Seung-Hui’s nationality as an example of Asian Americans still being excluded from the mainstream. “Major media outlets labeled Cho as a Korean national. Even though he came to the U.S. at age eight, he was considered a foreigner. For the Virginia Tech shooting, we put an emphasis on his Asian ethnicity.”That may be because Asians are the bad guys again. Ken Leung, who played Carter, the psychopathic mental patient on “The Sopranos,” is a professional bad guy. He’s known for playing a sadistic mutant who grows quills in “X-Men: the Last Stand,” for playing the psycho killer, Sang, in “Rush Hour,” and for playing that most evil of all creatures, a high school guidance counselor, in “The Squid and the Whale.”Ever since women have been given the choice to be either virgins or whores, Asians have been given the choice: gangster or geek? On the one hand, in pop culture you have the lovable nerd Hiro on the NBC’s hit show “Heroes.” On the other, you have DC Comics’ best-selling comic series of 2006, “52,” which features a sinister villain known as Chang Tsu, a revamped Wonder Woman Yellow Peril baddie from the 1960s previously known as Egg Fu, who assembled a cabal of evil scientists on the mysterious Oolong Island.“Four of America’s last five wars have been fought on Asian soil against Asian armies and that’s become part of our collective unconscious,” Jeff Yang, an author and a consultant on Asian-American marketing for Iconoculture, said. “Four decades of hostility, on and off, have given us this image of a cunning, heartless, inhuman Asian invader.”But it goes back earlier than that. In 1914, Jack London wrote a breathless fantasy about the extermination of all Chinese people called “An Unparalleled Invasion”; Buck Rogers made his debut fighting “Mongol hordes;” and the names Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless have entered our vocabulary along with James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. And these stereotypes are getting rehabilitated fast.Americans are worried about their jobs being outsourced to India, magazine covers are proclaiming that China is the world’s next superpower, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il is not only ramping up his nation’s nuclear program, but he’s been named as part of the science-fiction sounding “Axis of Evil.” “There’s a sense of anxiety and it’s coming out in popular culture,” Mr. Yang said.“Any other ethnicity or race are very vigilant and vocal about this,” Mr. Yang said. “They know all too well that the first signs of cultural danger are when people embrace these media images because from there everything else flows.”But things are hardly looking better for the future. The Olympics are going to Beijing in 2008. America is brining China up for trade violations in the WTO. India and America are at loggerheads over a nuclear deal. So it comes as no surprise that next summer’s big comic book movie is “Iron Man” starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr. Its villain? He’s called “The Mandarin.”

A Bad Week for Asian Americans Gets Worse

A Bad Week for Asian Americans Gets Worse

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