Blast from the Past: After centuries of racism, we're still not laughing. Voices from the Community: Amy Leang's racist experience at ASNE. Emil Amok: The Puckheads Think They're Funny. Lead Editorial: Heh, heh, heh.
	Elaine Chao Visits the Valley (in National News) Beware Rogue Immigration Consultants! (in Bay Area News) Aftermath of the Spy Plane Standoff (in Business) San Francisco International Film Fest (in A&E) Emil Amok: The Puckheads Think They're Funny (in Opinion)

Moments in Time with Bill Ong Hing

Still not Laughing

Popular San Francisco radio personality Don Bleu spoofs the spy-plane standoff, calling it a “fry over,” then calls a restaurant in China, teasing the person who answered who apparently could not speak English. A radio station in Springfield, Illinois suggests boycotting Chinese restaurants. Another commentator calls people with Chinese last names and harasses them. Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Pat Oliphant runs a cartoon portraying a buck-toothed Chinese waiter yelling at a customer (depicted as Uncle Sam), “Apologize Lotten Amellican!” The American Society of Newspaper Editors is entertained by the renowned satirical group Capitol Steps, featuring a white man dressed in a black wig and thick glasses impersonating a Chinese official who gestured wildly as he said, “ching, ching, chong, chong.” These reactions to the crisis over China’s detention of 24 U.S. crewmembers is history repeating itself in evil ways.

Oliphant’s multi-framed cartoon is reminiscent of a six-frame cartoon from the mid-1800s entitled, “The History of an Interloper.” It depicts Ah Sin, a Chinese immigrant getting a shoe factory job from a kindly white foreman named Crispin, who goes out of his way to help Ah Sin learn the trade. Soon, another Chinese gets hired, and then “they came in by the score.” Oliphant’s language-mocking term “Amellican” mirrors the 1800s caption in the frame showing the Chinese taking over: “While the Melicans napped, Their cheap pupils were apt.” Eventually, Crispin is booted, and Ah Sin “has grown wealthy and great.” Almost every issue of a newspaper called the Illustrated WASP carried an anti-Chinese cartoon. For example, in one March 1878 issue, a white official is grabbing Chinese by their pigtails and tossing them into jail for violating a “cubic air law,” purportedly aimed at Chinese overcrowding. Even after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the WASP ran a cartoon that used Uncle Sam (like Oliphant) bolting the door to the country, as a long line of tiny Chinese wearing “coolie hats” are sneaking in through a mouse-sized hole, balancing two-bucket poles over their shoulders.

The “ching, ching, chong, chong” routine by the Capitol Steps is reminiscent of what Mary Paik Lee (a Korean immigrant) recounted in her book, Quiet Odyssey. On her first day of school, kids circled, hit her, and chanted: “Ching Chong Chinaman / Sitting on a wall / Along came a white man / And chopped his head off.”

Sadly, many of us have heard variations of this as we’ve grown up in America.

Of course, the history of stereotypical jokes at the expense of Asians in America doesn’t end there. Consider Punjabi Sikhs, who retained a part of their traditional garb for religious reasons, only to endure the teasing calls of “ragheads.” Ask Japanese Americans who were taunted before, during, and after World War II internment.

APIs have fought back at media stereotyping. In 1988, hip Rolling Stone magazine featured an articled titled “Seoul Brothers,” about South Korean presidential elections. The article said that Koreans “all look alike — the same Blackglama hair, the same high-boned pie-plate face, the same tea-stain complexion, the same sharp-focused look in 1 million identical anthracite eyes.” A coalition of the Asian American Journalist Association, JACL, the Korean American Bar Association, and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center protested the racism and stereotyping, and the magazine acceded to demands for an editorial apology, the publication of critical letters, and the hiring of Asian American interns.

Comedians, DJs, and cartoonists claim their antics are meant as jokes, but they aren’t funny. In the past, these types of stunts have helped to fuel racist sentiment that has led to discrimination and serious deprivations of civil and human rights.