I’m in a crabby mood, so be forewarned: a new American Pop entry on the rather dreadful Esther Ku, some petty infighting, and what happens when satire runs off the rails, called “Unfunny“.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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?

Popularity: 1% [?]

The puzzling thing about the whole Kenneth Eng controversy — for those of you not keeping score at home, he’s the columnist for the San Francisco-based weekly newspaper AsianWeek who wrote the inflammatory “Why I Hate Blacks” column — is how this guy got hired in the first place. (We are now inevitably treated to the spectacle of various Asian American leaders having to step up to the mic and condemn the shithead individually. But, oh leaders — it’s really AsianWeek you should be going after for giving this guy a bigger venue. And as an afterthought, you could also address the fact that Eng isn’t the only Asian American racist — but that’s not something you want to think about right before you hold the townhall meetings with African American leaders.)

The article itself — pulled from the AsianWeek website, but the Chronicle helpfully provides a scan of it (see below instead) — is appalling. It’s also quite badly written — just the sort of nonsense you see on bulletin boards and not on nationally-circulated newspapers. And it isn’t his first foray into ranting either (see his November 2006 column, “Proof that Whites Inherently Hate Us”, or a later January 2007 column, “Why I Hate Asians”). Clearly not a one-off satirical piece (if it could be called satire). What, then, were AsianWeek‘s editors thinking when they hired someone who called himself “God of the Universe?”

I’m guessing it’s because Eng — correction, “Kenneth Eng, God” — is “the youngest published science fiction novelist in America.” I’m guessing someone found his musings on the Theory of Nothing / The Conceptual Theory of Everything (they’re Parts 2 and 3 and I can’t be bothered to find the first part) and figured they had a philosopher on their hands. Or maybe they found his short (semi-autobiographical?) piece, entitled “Glasses”, from a website called Bewildering Stories:

It had been a day since last Johnny Spectic saw something spectacular. And already he was bored. So bored that he felt like killing himself. You see, it was the end of his college years and he had nothing left to celebrate. The parties were over. The classes were done. Now, all he had to look forward to was getting a job, working for the next 30-odd years and getting a house that he would brood in until dying of dullness. Sigh, what a way to spend your life. Everything that was remotely spectacular was behind him.

Contemplating many deep thoughts, he took a stroll and wandered to a lens store nearby. That reminded him he needed new glasses.

Contemplating many deep thoughts, I can say that he obviously had a career as a columnist at AsianWeek to look forward to.

All the five-star reviews on Amazon.com notwithstanding — almost all written, suspiciously, by people who’ve posted only one review, i.e., Eng’s book — Eng also has a profile on Amazon with the blog entry “Religion Is For The Inferior:”

…most religious people I’ve met tend to be incredibly stupid/poor. They are usually black/hispanic immigrants who do not have the brains or the balls to understand science and thus resort to reading retarded stories about saviors and saints. (Oh, by the way, for those of you who want to scream at how “racist” I am for mentioning negroes and hispanics in such a way, go to someone who gives a sh*t).

Well. You’d think this would have sent off little alarm bells at the AsianWeek offices, but no. Or perhaps they missed his essay entitled “Discrimination Against Asians at NYU” (scroll further down) and didn’t read between the lines enough?

Come on, AsianWeek. I know you folks will wash your hands clean and say that the op-ed columnists don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, et cetera. But to run a column like that and not expect criticism is sleeping at the wheel.

But I think I know why — or more important, how — they hired Eng in the first place.

It’s because Eng is them, and Eng is in them:

“Reincarnation is not limited in time, space and material,” says Eng. “I could essentially be anyone living in the present, past, or future, or any imaginary being drawn from the Omnitemporal Realm. All consciousness is one. I am in everyone, friend or foe.”

Popularity: 1% [?]

My ever-mutating syllabus for my Asian American culture class is finally settling onto a vague coming-of-age theme. In the class’s earliest incarnations, I indulged my anthropological side with a couple of ethnographies; I’ve since moved to assigning readings in “the expressive arts,” which is the course catalog’s “official” conception of “culture.”

Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter is the lone, constant reading which will never be removed from my syllabi: as template for the Asian American memoir, it’s a quick but substantive read; the domestic drama has the virtue of being almost timeless; and it also provides the pedagogical opportunity to enable the students to read on different levels — to pay attention to the silences and ellipses, to think about the impact of such a memoir, to pull out the implications of Jade Snow’s decisions.

This semester I’m pairing it with Ed Lin’s Waylaid, a wonderfully hilarious and vulgar novel about a boy who, basically, wants to lose his virginity. (Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son was the runner-up, which I’ve taught before; so was R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s, but my students were so unprepared for the disjointed prose that they rebelled against it.) I read Waylaid when it came out — attracted mostly by Helen Zia’s incomparable blurb (“Ed Lin has wrought an Asian American Holden Caulfield, whose view from his tightly conscripted life of working at his parents’ motel is to get laid without getting fucked.”) — and immediately wanted to inflict it upon my students, but wasn’t sure how they would take all the joyous sleaze. But my colleague D-Dog (upon my recommendation!) has used it for a couple of semesters with great success, so my students will be reading it with/against Jade Snow.

It’s the films I’m stuck on right now. I’ve always loved Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing; it’s one of my favorite films, period, but I simply cannot muster any interest from the students every single time I show it. (Perhaps if it was some sort of film class, but…) My colleague Malcolm says that the students are simply “unprepared,” and I agree. Much of what the film is based on seems absent — should I really be so critical or presumptuous? — from the students’ cinematic vocabulary: the improvised-sounding dialogue, Charlie Chan films, the “long” takes, the use of silence, noir films in general, the “static” camera, the unsubtitled conversations, Vertigo, the absolutely sublime final five minutes, Le Samourai, even black and white film period…

So… Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow? (Funny — I think I’d rather teach John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow II — that, after all, is partly set in the U.S.) Chris Chan Lee’s disappointing Yellow? Gene Cajayon’s The Debut (not one of my favorites, but good to teach with)?

(Finally nailed down my Anthro class, videos, readings, everything: it’s college students and undocumented immigrants in the fall.)

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tim Yu writes:

Here’s my question, though–and I don’t have an answer: What is the difference, then, between the category “good poets who happen to be Asian American” and “the fantasy of social colorblindness”? If we reject the idea that the category “Asian American writing” has determinate content, then what does it mean to employ the category at all? In particular, what’s “Asian American” about a text whose only racial marker is the ostensibly Asian name of its author?

(I had to snip a delicious tidbit about a couple of poets that he asked me not to post, alas.)

But let me take a hastily written stab at it: I’m not so sure that I’d agree that “Asian American writing” doesn’t exist as a category, or that it refers to nothing on the ground. I simply reject what “Asian American writing” as a
discursive category has evolved (or devolved) into, as an Orientalist beast defined from within and without. Eileen‘s recovery/rescue of Jose Garcia Villa (in her edited volume of Villa’s work, The Anchored Angel) into the Asian American canon represents a main phase of this project: interrogating what Asian American literature has narrowly come to be. In turn, Tim’s excellent essay argues for Villa as a “proto-transnational” figure, haunting the borders of both “American” literature and “Asian American” literature and whose work, shorn of the usual ethnic signifiers, provides an excellent entry into questioning the notion of Asian American lit per se.

(Villa’s position in Filipino literature is a different story all together. My mother went to school in the ’50s and majored in English, which was why I was exposed to Villa at a young age. (One of her brothers was a poet, another was a critic, and so there was always poetry around the house.) In any case, she was totally into his coconuts/nipples poem, and was trying to explain it to me — now that I think about it now, it seems a little disturbing.

But by the time I went to college in the ’80s, the ’60s had happened, and the world had changed. A lit professor of mine in the Philippines was talking about how literature had to be socially engaged for it to have any relevance, and should not be created as simply art for art’s sake — “like those poems by that American, Jose Garcia Villa,” he said with barely disguised contempt. True story. It’s either that kind of dismissal, or Villa is way too canonized in the Philippines as a kind of distant literary father — enough so that people don’t have to read him anymore.)

(And I’ll digress and muddy the waters even further: if Tchaikovsky was gay, then would “The Nutcracker” be gay music? Or is he simply a good composer who happened to be gay? Does one runs the risk of devaluing sexuality if one says no? Or is there a huge gap in terms of content between music and poetry, i.e., is it less possible to be “ethnic” in music than in poetry?)

There are a couple of positions one can take regarding ethnicity, for instance, but it’s clear that there’s always a dynamic tension between both poles:

1. Ethnicity is elective. That is, all those ethnic markers — whether it be food, or language, or clothing, however seemingly arbitrary they may be — are things to be deployed, to be operationalized, and as such, ethnicity is malleable and flexible and highly contextual.

2. But many people labor under particular ethno-national categories imposed on them by states or other people, and so in that sense they have little choice in the matter. Tagalogs, for instance, like to think of everyone else in the Philippines as Filipino, even though that lived experience of being “Filipino” may be extremely different to, say, a Muslim resident in Mindanao. Ethnicity therefore can be shot through with unequal power relations and as such isn’t all that fluid.

3. And we know in any case that those ethnic choices are a fiction as well, since I have to wear my brown skin all day. Such colorblindness (or generic Americanness) does not exist in the same way for the person of color, as s/he is always/already marked as Other. The idea of race as a cultural construction may have been fostered by well-meaning sociologists and anthropologists, but one cannot wish away those pesky phenotypical differences (regardless of whatever cultural significance is accorded to them). In contrast, an Anglo American can wear four-leaf clovers and drink green beer and, in short, be Irish American for just one day, then retreat to Vanilla American the rest of the year. Asian Americans simply don’t have the “luxury” of retreat. (But to digress again: can literature give the writer that illusion of momentary retreat? But can the text be so easily demarcated from “real life?”)

In any case, there probably shouldn’t be any absolute position — or, ultimately, it may all be a matter of semantics, and the debate becomes pointless after a while. The statements about the Wayne Wang films in my previous entry are, according to Eileen’s criteria, both accurate. But if someone were to say that Chan Is Missing is a “more” Asian American film than Smoke, surely one would agree, and one doesn’t have to be acceding to Orientalist criteria to say that.

I’ll end with something from Dana Takagi, from her essay “Maiden Voyage: Excursion into Sexuality and Identity Politics in Asian America” (found in Russell Leong’s edited volume, Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay & Lesbian Experience):

A politics of identity and whatever kind of politics ensues from that project — multiculturalism, feminism, and gay movements — is first of all a politics about identity. That is, about the lack of a wholistic and ‘coherent narrative’ derived from race, class, gender, and sexuality…

And later on in the essay:

The gist of this essay has been to insist that our valuation of hetereogeneity not be ad hoc and that we seize the opportunity to recognize non-ethnic based differences — like homosexuality — as an occasion to critique the tendency toward essentialist currents in ethnic-based narratives and disciplines. In short, the practice of including gayness in Asian America rebounds into a reconsideration of the theoretical status of the concept of “Asian American” identity. The interior of the category “Asian American” ought not be viewed as a hierarchy of identities led by ethnic-based narratives, but rather, the complicated interplay and collision of different identities.

All right, back to grading.

Popularity: 2% [?]