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October 3, 1998
For our Fifth General Meeting, we had a special guest lecturer named Wayne Ho. He started off his lecture by showing us a segment from the hit animated television show, South Park. The episode was about the South Park Cows going to China for the World Championship in Dodgeball. It had many stereotypical remarks and the Chinese characters were all drawn the same way with slanted eyes. After the episode was over, he wanted to find our opinions on it. Some people were offended by the remarks and felt that it conveyed a bad message to the American public. Others felt that it is only a cartoon and it was made all in good fun. Personally, I love South Park and I was used to all the jokes that they do to make fun of everyone so I found it highly entertaining. However, I do agree with the fact that it might be bad if the wrong audience saw this episode.
After that we talked about the movie “Rush Hour” and how Chris Tucker made fun of the bad guys, who were Asian, by saying something like “Sweet and Sour Chicken”. I haven’t seen the movie yet so I couldn’t really comment on what happened, but from what I heard, I thought it was kind of offensive. However, if I did see it in a movie theater, I would have probably laughed at the joke because I wouldn’t have taken the remark that seriously. Mr. Ho went on to explain that Asians are in the middle of society, sandwiched between the Whites on top and the Blacks on the bottom. That is why blacks could get away with remarks like that, but Asians wouldn’t be able to since they are not at the bottom. I agree to what he said and how Asians are stuck as the “model minority”. He then went on to give a couple more examples in the media that have stereotyped against Asians and concluded that there needs to be some change.
