The Wily Filipino

The Bewildering Story of Kenneth Eng, Part Two.

Some new developments -- the inevitable apology, the inevitable firing, the inevitable TV movie... just kidding. But I'll take (jk)'s point below (originally posted as a comment in my first Kenneth Eng post) half-seriously.

(jk) wrote:

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.

To this I have no answer, and I'm puzzling not just over what made Eng tick, but what I would have done had I been one of his professors.

Maybe some blogger out there is already hunting down Eng's high school classmates; until then, all we have to rely on is his essay entitled "Discriminating against Asians at NYU." But there's no big flashback scene, no single traumatic event that would explain where this would come from (not that it matters). Eng leads us into his problems in medias res:

...when I was at Stony Brook, I received at least 10 death threats from students who hated my opinions, and was once thrown out of a philosophy class for bringing up racial issues. When I entered Tisch in May 2002, I assumed that the people there would be more intelligent and that I would be more tolerated. Thence, when I took my first film production class, I expressed my negative views on America, religion and African Americans.

No answers there, because his thoughts are clearly already fully formed by his mid- to late-teens. Nor does he do himself any favors here, in much the same way he introduces himself at a J.K. Rowling bulletin board. Let's see what happens next:

Unfortunately, my assumptions were naive, for NYU’s populace was just as mindless as any other. The class shouted, threatened and loathed me after hearing of my views, often referring to me as “racist fuck” and “terrorist” whilst staring at me as if I were a bestial outcast... In fact, the professor reported me to the dean in an attempt to have me expelled for my beliefs, but did nothing when a white person made sexist comments against women.

We aren't told what these sexist comments were, but it doesn't matter at this point. I'm simply amazed at how shocked AsianWeek was -- oops, I meant Kenneth Eng! -- that his classmates would react so negatively.

Furthermore, since I always speak my mind, I also made negative remarks about students’ films in class critiques in an attempt to help them improve their work. A student punched me in the back of the head just for being honest about his film. Expectedly, my request to call security was ignored, and the professor just laughed at me, saying it was a joke. In response, I punched the white student in the face three times and told him that I was being a comedian.

Nevertheless, I was not going to surrender to the brainwashed majority. Determined, I voiced my convictions loud and clear in my next film course, but this time, I gave the new professor fair warning about them before the class started. Despite my kind gesture, he immediately reported me to the dean just like the other one did.

This paragraph reads exactly like something out of a Shouts and Murmurs piece from The New Yorker, except that it isn't funny. (Okay, Ian Frazier isn't very funny either, but you get my drift.) I can only imagine what he told the student. (It was at this point that I started wondering, as well, whether this was all an elaborate hoax. But I don't think so.)

But here's the thing: if he had given me "fair warning" about being a racist prior to the beginning of the semester, wouldn't I have kicked him out of my classroom as well? Could I really see myself sitting him down in my office, patiently explaining why he can't just say those things out loud, or why they were wrong? No.

And obviously AsianWeek, which was surely given "fair warning" -- we're talking a few minutes of Googling here, people! -- didn't kick him out. And gave him a paycheck to boot.

It starts dawning on the reader at this point that "discrimination against Asians at NYU" is really all about "discrimination against Kenneth Eng, God." But let's read on, skipping the part about someone impersonating his voice and getting to Eng's encounter with David Irving:

I was later asked to speak to the Tisch Chairman David Irving about my conflicts. At first, he seemed like a rational man who could be reasoned with. However, when the conversation shifted to my controversial views, I told him that I thought Hitler was not a coward and that African Americans were receiving unfair aid from the American government at the expense of Asian Americans. He immediately called the dean, furiously wanting to get me expelled.

Congratulations, AsianWeek, for hiring someone who's actually written, in print, that "Hitler was not a coward!" (The fact that Eng said this to Steven Spielberg's former brother-in-law is even more ironic.)

Let's skip Eng's failing grades (surprise), and move to The Racist Black Girl:

One would think that is as unfair as it gets, but the plot thickens yet. In September 2003, I took a class in which the professor stated clearly: “…don’t use stereotypes”. For the sake of being nice, I was about to comply to this rule just this once, but a week later, a black girl in that class pitched her script, which was loaded with Asian stereotypes. It was so unambiguously racist that a dolt would have been able to notice. Yet – surprise, surprise -- none of the whites made a passing comment about it.

Although I believe that she has the right to express her racist opinions just like I have a right to express mine, the class treated her completely differently than they treated me. When I expressed my negative perspectives on blacks, 90% of all the students call me a “racist fuck” and harassed me physically and verbally, but when a black says something insulting against an Asian no one gives a darn. Not even the professor who said, “don’t use stereotypes” made a single comment of it. In fact, when I defended myself against the black student’s remarks, the whites were outraged and the professor threw me out of class, stating “I cannot imagine any way in which [the student] insulted you”. Gee, she would have practically kissed my scrotum if I were black and I was discriminated against, but since I’m just a yellow-skinned Asian guy, I guess I just don’t have the same right to express opinions as the whites and blacks do.

There are several things going on here, one paralleling all the attention AsianWeek is getting (and should be getting). One is that Eng's previous, equally virulent columns (on whites and Asians) oddly did not get much attention, and it was only after his "Why I Hate Blacks" column that shit starts hitting the fan. (Of course, his last column was way more direct; he starts, after all, with "why we should discriminate against blacks.")

Unfortunately, at no point does he actually tell us what the African American woman writes; if it were "so unambiguously racist that a dolt would have been able to notice," then surely he would at least marshal the evidence to gain his readers' sympathies? Nuh uh.

And finally, Eng snaps:

I certainly wasn’t going to take this lying down. When I entered my last film class, I wanted to give them a taste of their own medicine. Every session, I flooded the conversation with derogatory remarks about every ethnic group conceivable, spewed loads of anti-American remarks and blared out against the weak-mindedness of religious followers. As expected, the professor tried again to censor me, claiming that it was my fault that the class was getting angry.

And at this point, would I have still sat him down patiently and told him to seek counselling? No -- the campus police would have been at the door ready to pull him out of my classroom. It's amazing the guy graduated from NYU at all.

And now we get to the sad and, quite frankly, frightening conclusion:

All the while, the white students clung to each other like cells of a giant superorganism, muttering to each other whenever I said something they were afraid to say, laughing whenever I created art that wasn’t as cliched as theirs. At first, their ignorance was so animalistic that it was disgusting. However, after reflecting upon how most of them only do what society tells them to and live in fear of being despised, I did not hate them anymore. I pitied them. I may not have the “pleasures” of having human companionship like they do, but at least I am not a coward. To this day, I stand by all of my opinions no matter what the consequences.

And one piece of the puzzle fits into place: Kenneth Eng becomes Kenneth Eng, God.

I honestly don't see how I would have dealt with him differently. But AsianWeek sure did. I'm wondering now whether the newspaper asked him for references and Eng, the creative genius that he is, sent them some.

(Postscript to his essay: Unfortunately, a Google search for "Pamela Love," who apparently made a documentary about Eng's case (according to him), comes up with some not-safe-for-work links instead.)

But AsianWeek, one more piece of the puzzle is in your hands: why did you hire this guy?

Posted by the wily filipino at March 2, 2007 02:48 AM