The Wily Filipino

i just saw an article on the whole controversy today and just cringed in shame. i was totally disgusted. i hate people like this, and i hate being, perforce, identified with people like this. but you're right that it's asianweek's fault, especially as this wasn't his first imbecilic attempt at being politically incendiary or anti-pc or whatever the hell he calls his ambitions.

this guy is HI-LARIOUS....
being from Geneva-Switzerland, i have no clue how Asians in America fare but here the most you'll get is being mistaken for another asian...
perhaps that some of his comment are true about how asians in the states will mimic the culture which they are in but then who doesn't???
you see that everywhere, it IS sad how people will lose a lot of their own culture, being myself someone who takes great pride in my filipino heritage though i grew far from home, but that's what tends to happen when you live in another country... what's the world to do?
but all his other thoughts are just WAAAAAY off.
i just wonder how they could have hired him in the first place or how he manages to stay there.
Ludicrous, i say.
do asians in the states, or anywhere else for that matter, REALLY fall for his crap?
but he does give all of us a very good name, eh?

i think kenneth eng is eng-eng...its the result of eating too much chinese fly lice....

I took the time to read some of his earlier "columns"; his writing and his views smack of one very emotionally and intellectually stunted individual. I agree, the driving question is how someone who is so blatantly out of synch with reason, history, etc., was handed the opportunity to spew his venom to a national audience.

"What, then, were AsianWeek's editors thinking when they hired someone who called himself "God of the Universe?""

I suspect they were thinking that he might just provoke people enough to get their paper a lot more attention than it had gotten before. And it worked.

You know, if I were told there was this great newspaper called "CaucasianWeek" or maybe "WhiteWeek", I would be looking around for a "Made by the KKK" sticker on it someplace.

As you note, AsianWeek put their stamp of editorial approval on Eng's other offerings, so, in their estimation, he must have been performing some kind of useful service to them and their readers.

I have a question for you. How many young Asians, or old ones, do you think share Kenneth Eng's points of view about non-Asians? I would bet it is more than a few. And why, if that is true, shouldn't their views be heard in something called AsianWeek?

Also, what does "Asian" mean to Asians?

Wouldn't Kenneth Eng point out, if he understood it, that the word, Asian, is a European description, a slight euphemizing, of places and peoples Europeans formerly called "Oriental"?

(jk)

I'm black, and I cracked up when I read Eng's article. It's such a sad cry for attention, a way to be "edgy" when you lack authentic writing skills. When I started looking up some of his other work, I noticed that everything he writes has the same premise: nobody loves, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms? Kenneth, darling? When everyone hates you everywhere you go, IT'S YOU!

BTW, in his NYU article, Eng claims that he was punched in the back of the head three times, and retaliated by punching the student in the face. I think Eng's knack for storytelling is about as faulty as his grip on world history.

It goes without saying, as I alluded to above -- or maybe it does need to be said -- that there are Asian Americans who certainly feel the same way as Eng does about blacks. Some of the most vicious things I've heard said about African Americans were told me by other Asians, along precisely the same lines as Eng wrote (with regard to welfare, etc.). But they're not exactly given a readership of almost 50,000 people -- which, I imagine, will probably go up (or down) as a result of this incident.

Newspaper editors aren't stupid; they must have read this as a deliberate racial provocation, and published it as such. (I do agree with Eng on Hot 97 though; I haven't forgotten that, but I don't hold all of Black America responsible for it.) But the column can't be called a convoluted exercise in saying "We're trying to represent the full spectrum of Asian Americans, including those of racists, and we're not proud of it," however true that might be -- in any case, it's not an excuse they can hide behind indefinitely.

Unfortunately, I can only imagine that AsianWeek saw the column as a perfect, if crass, opportunity for publicity. All delivered to you on Black History Month too. It'll all be fine and dandy until companies start pulling their advertisements, but we'll see about that.

As for (jk)'s comments -- just about the last person I’d want to debate with online =) -- I'd say that there were indeed newspapers that could be called "WhiteWeek," which was just about every mainstream newspaper in America. Some might argue they still are.

But (jk) is right about "Asian" -- I've also always told my students that "Asian" immigrants only really turn Asian once they arrive in the United States. And there are, of course, problems with the label: it's a combination of semi-politicized self-ascription and the state's imposition of the category that really smells of "Oriental" to begin with. (After all, it's an accident of history that "Asian" is defined (culturally or phenotypically) in the way most people in the U.S. conceive of it in the first place, i.e. "East Asian." If the Indian coolie trade had widened further to include more of the American mainland, we'd probably have a very different conception of "Asians" now.) For better or worse, however, it's the "racial" category around which many Asian Americans have organized themselves.

And for Gladys: I do see your point about "cringing in shame" (and I understand why the local Asian community leaders had to voice their disgust and embarrassment as well), but in an ideal United States, Kenneth Eng shouldn't have to be seen, or mistaken for, the whole Asian American population. I have every right not to be thought of as representing or embodying "the Filipino voice," whatever that might be. Too bad AsianWeek calls itself "The Voice of Asian America" though.

Eng just got fired by Asianweek:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/01/HATE.TMP

"I'd say that there were indeed newspapers that could be called "WhiteWeek,"

Could be, from a certain perspective, but those papers, the MSM ones anyway, haven't yet felt sufficiently comfortable, or would it be sufficiently threatened, to actually adopt that identification.

As someone said to me yesterday, when I pointed out what you did (that is, I was arguing your point): "The MSM don't represent "white" people, but rich old white men." I then pointed out that there were now some rich old white women being given access to power, so the MSM were now at least a little more inclusive in their voice.

At any rate, returning to the pertinent issue, it is pretty funny (sad, stupid) to see, once again, a newspaper trying to wriggle free from its conscious and utterly intentional editorial decision to publish something they must have known might upset a lot of people.

How the hell can AsianWeek reasonably expect anybody to take them seriously when they claim "promotion of hate speech of any kind will not and should not ever be tolerated" in response to the furor over their publication of an article entitled "Why I Hate Blacks"?

How much "review" of an editorial process do you have to make to realize that Eng's stuff, his shtick, was approved for months at AsianWeek, that it was clearly racially oriented (indeed "Asian supremacist" in orientation) and primed to offend bunches of people because of it, and that AsianWeek published his articles precisely because of that potential to offend?

Have you ever watched "All in the Family"? I am watching, after many years, the episodes from season one. The level of extreme, unambiguous, bigotry expressed by Archie Bunker in the show is remarkable. As is the continuous laughter that accompanies every dumb, bigoted remark. And Archie Bunker is now recalled as the "greatest" television character in history.

The thing is, early on in the series they made very clear that Archie's feelings and ideas were the product of fear and frustration. He had been through the Great Depression, seen it basically kill his father, and deprive him of any opportunity to better himself materially. He was very afraid of change. Very afraid of difference---he even dislikes the floor plan of a neighboring house just because it is the reverse of his own.

I just wonder if we might get further toward reducing bigotry if we try to understand where bigoted people, especially very young people like Kenneth Eng, are coming from, and to address those places and feelings of fear and hate in ways that will not be likely to make them feel even more alienated and hateful than they already were.

I doubt Kenneth Eng is thinking today about the people whose feelings he has hurt because of his ignorance. I suspect he is thinking today about his own feelings and how once again the "Aryans", as he calls white people, have forced Asians to submit to the dominant "white" opinion.

(jk)

OMG!!!!! ignorance really is bliss,,, because you never realize what an embarrassment you are!!!

Every now and then I would have my students perform an exercise based on Peggy McIntosh's enumeration of the effects of white privilege by having them form a single line and make them walk up a step if they agreed with the statements being read. Invariably the white students would be far ahead (and because this is the Bay Area, a lot of Asian students would have walked up too), with the black students at the rear. And after discussing the implications of all this, I would ask them about privilege in terms of gender, sexuality, etc. -- and class, where power is distributed among different, though not completely different, lines. And that at that point they'd see a good bunch of white folks in the back too.

The ONE potential positive aspect of AsianWeek printing Eng's drivel is that there are genuine tensions between blacks and Asians that should be addressed, and there should be a dialogue between blacks and the 99.9% percent of Asians who aren't mentally ill like Kenneth Eng or cronyist hacks like the owners of AsianWeek.

Quite a few of you asked, what was AsianWeek thinking when they printed Eng's spew? Well, AsianWeek is owned by the Fang family. And if you've lived in San Francisco and paid attention to local news/politics/media there long enough, that will explain a lot. The Fangs are a local media magnate family that have owned a bunch of other papers in the area at various times, and they are a bunch of corrupt, venal hacks who have fucked up every paper they own. If Eng's columns were going to appear in any non-right-wing publication, it was most likely to be in a publication owned by the Fangs.

After perusing Eng's other works on the interweb, I have to conclude that Eng is psychotic, probably irretrievably so. Thus, Asian Week should be faulted for both hiring Eng in the first place and then continuing to publish him after his psychosis revealed itself.

It is indeed tempting to laugh at Eng; he cuts a ridiculous figure. Yet really, he is a sad individual to be pitied. He is handicapped by his own mind. Making fun of Eng is akin to teasing the mentally retarded and the physically crippled.

That said, I have come across racism and prejudice in my own family. My late grandmother held some very vile views against not only "gaijin", blacks (or colored as she'd say), and latinos, but also other Asian races. Her disdain for Chinese, Koreans, and Philippinos was probably worse than her disdain for any other race. Oddly enough, she had great respect for Jews, possibly because my father is Jewish. (Yes, I am Jewpanese.)