Week 5 Posting

Question 2: Can you think of an encounter with some type of representation in the mass media (give a musical example if possible) that you felt strongly about?

I can think of two noteworthy examples that immediately come to mind when I consider (mis)representations in the mass media, about which I felt strongly. Both of these encounters involve a misrepresentation of an ethnicity - in these cases, the Chinese ethnicity. Being Chinese American, I sympathize with both the Chinese and American sensibilities. However, since I live in the United States, most of the encounters that I have with the mass media are from the American perspective. Occasionally, I see or hear something in American mass media that is a bit jarring to my Chinese American perspective. These rare instances cause me to think carefully and reconsider my own identity, based on my visceral response to these encounters.



The first example is a song called "Summer Girls" by a pop group called LFO. This song first hit the radio when I was in middle school, around 1998-1999. Most of the lyrics in this song are harmless, in my opinion, except for one line in the chorus - "New Kids on the Block had a bunch of hits / Chinese food makes me sick / And I think it's fly when girls stop by in the summer..." When I heard that line disparaging Chinese food, I was initially upset. I didn't understand why a group of Caucasian boys needed to include that line in a seemingly innocuous, inane pop song. As I thought about it more, I began to think that the inclusion of this phrase about Chinese food probably wasn't an act of racism that revealed the songwriters' true feelings about Chinese food. I told myself that LFO probably put this line in the song just to be "funny," and so that it could rhyme with "Abercrombie and Fitch," which is used later in the chorus. This song doesn't bother me as much as the next example does; however, I hope that musicians will carefully consider how their music affects the thoughts of their audience, whether positively or negatively.



This is a clip of Rosie O'Donnell on the TV Show "The View," which aired in December 2006. O'Donnell made a remark about Danny DeVito's apparently infamous intoxicated appearance, in which she said, "The fact is that it's news all over the world. You know, you can imagine in China it's like, 'Ching chong, ching chong, Danny DeVito, ching chong chong chong chong, drunk, The View, ching chong." When I first heard about this incident, I was angry. I couldn't believe that she made this comment on national television. Perhaps being born and raised in California has led me to think that Americans are generally tolerant and open toward other nationalities and ethnicities, especially the "model minority" of Asian Americans, but this racist comment was unbelievable. It is interesting to consider that Rosie O'Donnell is quite outspoken when it comes to people making disparaging comments about gays and lesbians in the media or in the public forum, but she apparently has no qualms about insulting the Chinese language, which is spoken by more than a fifth of the world's population.



My last example is a relatively new song by the Chinese American rapper Jin. In this song, which is performed almost entirely in the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, Jin raps about his life in America, being both Chinese and American, and how much he appreciates it. I think this is really interesting because Jin's audience is mostly American, particularly those who don't understand Cantonese. Despite the language barrier (he can speak perfect English, by the way), he persists in rapping in Cantonese, perhaps as a way to show honor to his heritage and demonstrate that despite the fact that he was born in America, he is still proud of his Chinese background.