Language/Assimilation/Success

An observation/disclaimer: Ironically, Cheuk Kwan's documentary series "Chinese Restaurants" is less interested with Chinese restaurants and more interested in what such establishments can tell us about the Chinese diaspora. Kwan focuses on the bigger picture and often neglects to do, what I would call, a true study of "food culture" to get to the more dramatic diasporic personal stories of struggle, alienation, and regret.

Thus, my post (and I believe most of our posts) will have less to do with food itself. (Any observations regarding this?)

In Kwan's 4th installment of the "Chinese Restaurants" series Latin Passions, Kwan visits Peru and documents two very different stories by two very different Chinese Peruvians. On one hand, we have the owner of San Joy Lao, Luis, a very successful restaurateur who hosts his own Chinese cuisine cooking show in Lima. On the other hand, we have the owner of Chifa San Luis, Maria, a recent immigrant who feels stuck in her job and in her surroundings.

Luis is much more assimilated/intergrated into Peruvian culture than Maria, who still feels like a stranger in Peru. Most interestingly, Maria speaks Cantonese while being interviewed and Luis speaks in Spanish. The level of assimilation and, to an extent, sucess in the restaurant business corresponds directly to language proficiency.

With this in mind, what do we make of Chiang Fu Ching, the bi-lingual Spring Roll King of Buenos Aires, Argentina? How do his abilities to speak both Spanish and Mandarin affect what we think about him as a member of the Chinese diaspora?

Also, a tangentially related topic: The etymology of the Peruvian word "chifa." It's really quite interesting and may help us digest/understand the relationship between language and assimilation.

Peru is the only place where Chinese restaurants are known as chifas. Chifa is a Peruvian word. My grandparents would say "let's cook" which in Cantonese is chui fan. "To eat" in the Hakka dialect--my grandparents were Hakka--is chi fan. Our Peruvian brothers in Calle Capon would hear thousands of Chinese, around 11 in the morning, say chui fan, "let's cook," or at noon, chi fan, "let's eat." Hearing a chi fan and chui fan, they combined into a single word achifa, "let's eat Chinese." That's why chifa refers to Chinese restaurants.

Bruce Lee as the model minority

To expand Clarissa’s post regarding Fu Manchu vs. the Model Minority, I would like to bring up the question of language. Clarissa wrote, “In true Fu Manchu-mode, Han is an urbane, evil genius who aims to infiltrate Western society and bring about its moral collapse.” The fact that Han is an urbane genius should be explored further. In my view, it is no coincidence that Han’s English is near flawless, with a slick sonorousness that is befitting of a ruler, while Lee’s English is heavily accented and somewhat mousy to boot. Lee’s character never has the booming vocal presence of Han, and his exaggerated screaming is at times cringe-worthy.

The point of such a distinction is that the figure of the Oriental madman, as an emblem of the Yellow Peril, is threatening for the very reason that he is able to blend into white society. He is capable, if he chooses, of threatening the cultural exclusivity of white assimilation. By the same token, the model minority is never threatening because he is always marked by demeanor and speech as ineluctably foreign. It is reminiscent of early gangster films, in particular Scarface (1932), starring Paul Muni as the titular character. In that film, Scarface represents a dangerous model of assimilation—he abandons his first-generation Italian mother, speaks a slangy, urban English, and shortens his given name Antonio to simply Tony. Tony Calmonte buys all the luxuries of American life, including an Anglo girlfriend. Han, incidentally, also has a blonde white woman as his closest assistant. About midway through Scarface, we are shown a citizens’ meeting in which various representatives of an urban community gather to discuss Calmonte’s crime spree. The representative from the Italian-American community, speaking only at the end when the Anglos have had their bits, shakes his fist and rattles off “That’sa true-a, he’sa disgrace-a to my people!” It is a typical device in these films to contain the threat of the alien by marking the “ideal” ethnic citizen with traits that are foregrounded and superficially apparent. In being largely incapable of speech and more or less inhuman in fighting prowess (Bruce Lee is never seriously challenged in any of his matches), Lee is inadvertently playing into a construction of racial otherness that is contained by whiteness.

This is the same sort of contained racialization that allowed whites to appreciate non-white fighters like Joe Louis, whose manager John Roxborough forced to be on his “best behavior” at all times, outlined by the following seven commandments:

1. He was never to have his picture taken along with a white woman.

2. He would never go into a nightclub alone.

3. There would be no soft fights.

4. There would be no fixed fights.

5. He was never to gloat over a fallen opponent.

6. He was to keep a dead pan in front of the cameras.

7. He was to live and fight clean.

Joe Louis was loved by whites for the reason that he was not Jack Johnson, who held the championship from 1908-1915. Johnson lived large, boasted, boozed around, and married white women, essentially living his life just to piss off the white man. In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee is Joe Louis to Han’s Jack Johnson.

This is not to say that Bruce Lee's other films are devoid of conscious radicalism. This one is just a real stinker, even though it has some of the greatest martial arts sequences ever filmed.

白人看不懂

Can you read the title of this post? Are you chuckling right now? Did you actually manage to read this post before class, even though I posted at 5-freaking-AM?

Translated from Chinese, with an extra dash of fluency thrown in, them words mean "White people can't read this." I laughed pretty hard when I first saw a T-shirt with that written across the front. I mean, how brilliant was that? It was all the times of being misunderstood, taken as Japanese, and being "ching-chang-chong"ed at, rolled up into one awesome slogan... and then you passive-aggressively stick the slogan on the back of an unsuspecting [white] schlub. Of course, there are white people who CAN read it, but they can never really understand how sweet it is to see it for the first time as a Chinese-literate Chinese-American.

The internet isn't telling me where this phrase came from, but it was at least popularized through the Yellow Fever video that took to the internet a few years back (if you haven't seen it: WATCH IT, it's hilarious). And then you get the groups on Facebook and other places, proudly waving the banner of 白人看不懂.

The phrase might have already passed its peak (perhaps like AzN pRyDe), but it still means something to those who can relate. It's in the same spirit as sites like Hanzi Smatter, which is basically a spit in the face of that "You're in America--Learn English!" attitude (I guess instead, it's saying "There are other people on this planet--Try not to look like a dumbass to 1/6 of them").

To me, it's also a clear wave "goodbye" to the days when we all wistfully hoped for the Melting Pot to actually smelt all the ethnicities together. Like those moments on Ally McBeal when Ling would just break out in Mandarin and take everyone else down a peg... it's really OWNING your language/heritage/ethnicity/culture and being proud of it.