Stuff white people like

And now for something COMPLETELY different:

I'm not sure if someone has already shared this link, but a friend just sent it to me so I thought I'd share it with everyone else, because quite a few Asian things are on this list of Stuff White People Like.

It's obviously tongue-in-cheek, since the goal of all of the posts is to help a person please or deal with his/her white friends and acquaintances. With the recent satires (using the term very lightly) on Asians at UPenn and (I think it was) the University of Colorado, I thought it'd be interesting to throw some white satire in the mix (though I must admit that it is a LOT more subtle than the recent college paper satires).

My friend originally linked me to "Asian Girls", which is #11 on the list, and currently second most popular after St. Patricks's Day... HIGHLY stereotyped, just to warn you.

And in honor of the food theme of this week, be sure to also take at look at Diversity (#7), Sushi (#42) and Asian Fusion Food (#45).

If this doesn't get you guys angry, I don't know what will

That racist jackasshole Elkhay actually celebrated the launching of Chinese Laundry by bringing in a real, live, and nude Asian American model.

http://www.bostonherald.com/track/inside_track/view.bg?articleid=1079100&srvc=rss

And to make matters worse, the oxygen thieves over at the Herald have to be racist towards Jenn too.

New Asian eatery’s wanton ad leaves bad taste for some

By Inside Track
Monday, March 10, 2008

Chinese Laundry, a new fusion eatery in Providence has drawn the ire of a blogger called “Angry Asian American Woman” who is steamed about provocative print ads placed by the restaurant to promote tomorrow night’s opening.

The glossy ads, which have run in Providence Monthly, show a nearly naked woman with Oriental symbols tattooed on her torso with copy that reads “Good things come to those who wait” and “The wait is over.”

The ad, according to Jenn, the Angry one, “relies on Orientalist fetishization to sell the store: The message of the ad is that the Asian food of the restaurant - like Asian women - are exotic and different, and will represent a new experience.

“Diners are urged by the ad, then, to come and consume the Eastern food much as they would hope to consume and conquer the Asian woman,” she writes on her blog at www.reappropriate.com.

Whoa. What if you only want a bowl of chow foon?

Jenn’s noodle would have been really fried if she caught the scene on Friday night, when Chinese Laundry threw an opening-night party attended by New England Patriots [team stats] Dan Koppen, Matt Light [stats] and Sam Neal.

Apparently, the star of the night was a live Asian model draped in red silk sheets and sushi - and not much else - posing atop a long table that could be viewed from the glass floor in the main dining room.

John Elkay, the restaurant’s owner, posted on the blog over the weekend that “The only thing I was trying to conquer was a guest’s appetite.

“In today’s overstimulated world is it possible we were just trying to get the attention of the reader and not trying to conquer the east and their woman?” he asked.

Despite the response by the owner, fired-up bloggers are still calling for a boycott and a campaign backed by a national civil rights organization. And one over-zealous poster suggested torching the North Main Street eatery! But the Angry Asian American woman threw cold water on that one.

And speaking of Koppen, we hear the almost-bachelor-no-mo’ offensive line biggie was roasted and toasted by his buds Tedy Bruschi [stats], Light and many more at Abe & Louie’s steakhouse in the Back Bay the other night.

Koppen and fiancee Amber van Eeghen, an ex-New England Patriots [team stats] cheerleader, are tying the knot veddy soon. Rib-eyes all around.

Scanned Chinese Laundry Ad

Flame away.

Orientalism and the Illusion of Third World Solidarity in Enter the Dragon

Despite being filmed in Hong Kong and the presence of Bruce Lee at all stages of the production, Enter the Dragon is a film that pays no respect to anything Chinese. The China of Enter the Dragon is no more than a bastardized pastiche of Orientalist tropes, starting with the very beginning with Lee’s character at the Shaolin temple. Despite ostensibly being a monastery, complete with bald Buddhist monks in orange robes, Bruce Lee speaks of only of the trite “philosophy” of combat. Throughout the film, Lee displays a thoroughly cocky attitude and a crypto-fascist fascination with violence (recall the scene of the mantis fight). Despite his little spiel about the art of fighting without fighting, at no time does Lee even give an opportunity for Han’s minions to turn tail and flee.

The scene of the banquet is travesty. Complete with sumo wrestlers, acrobats, caged birds, and a Chinese orchestra, the banquet is nothing more than a mythologized white Asia, an Asia that is commodified for foreign consumption. Even Chinese people are commodified—it is implied through the body language the white Roper and the two Chinese women servants who flank him, that the women are available for sexual favors. Compare this to the representation of Chinese men, who basically huddle to themselves. In the cases where Chinese men and women are together interacting, as in the brief scene at the 36:30 mark, they are actually engaged in friendly conversation instead of nonchalantly smiling like Roper. Note the difference in body language as well. The woman that the two Chinese men are conversing with stands over them, while Roper sits above his women in a clear display of dominance.

Like the other two protagonists, the character of Williams is equally problematic. Introduced as an inner city martial artist linked to pan-Africanism and black power, he is potentially the most politically radical character, and he makes several moves in this direction. First, he fights the racist cops in a physical act of standing up for his community. Later, as he enters Hong Kong, he goes on foot instead of being taxied around on rickshaw like Roper. And he even makes a comment about the misery of the Hong Kong slums, seemingly a show of solidarity. However, this veneer quickly wears transparent. When he is offered the predominantly-Asian gaggle of sex slaves by Han’s assistant, he does not hesitate for a moment and becomes the buck mandingo of white fantasies. In one swoop, he uncritically replicates the exploitation of women, of Asia and the Third World, and of the underclass. His sense of class solidarity and consciousness of exploitation either does not extend to women or is dropped the instant he can turn an advantage and become an exploiter himself. Later, as Williams watches the execution of the poor guards, whose leniency towards his violation of Han’s rules invited a death sentence, his face does not betray the slightest bit of shock or compassion. In the end Asians, and by extension the Third World, are faceless, voiceless, and serve as nothing but fodder to the West.

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.