September 4, 2002

WAGING WAR AGAINST ASIAN STEREOTYPES

By Tom Plate

Does The U.S. definition of "news" all but exclude the normal?

(C) 2002 Asia Pacific Media Network

LOS ANGELES --- One of the best reading experiences in the United States this summer is the thriller "Absolute Rage," certainly a rage among applauding reviewers from Publishers Weekly to the Los Angeles Times. The 14th in a series of crime thrillers, it tells a well-informed tale about America's brutal union politics, a bloody Waco-like showdown in the hills of West Virginia and the tensions and contradictions in the country's system of criminal justice.

It also brings the reader back to the Vietnam War of a quarter-century ago by assigning a choice role to a Vietnamese organized-crime gang. The clan's wily godfather, Tran, plays a sort of emotional godfather to the daughter of the novel's protagonists, a husband-and-wife team echoing Nick and Nora Charles of the 1930s, those witty literary crime-fighters whom Hollywood was to make famous in a series of motion pictures based on the "Thin Man" detective novel.

Much like the Italian organized-crime boss in Mario Puzo's epic novel "The Godfather" -- not to mention the classic seventies' film -- Tran offers the protagonist-couple Marlene and Butch Karp an alternative course of justice when the established system falls short of the mark. His Vietnamese gang is no ragtag collection of street punks, but rather a well-disciplined outfit of veterans -- and sons of veterans -- of the war against America. When the federal authorities back off from direct confrontation, Tran's gang -- for a psychic measure of historic revenge as well as pecuniary gain -- is more than happy to make short work of Branch Davidian-style rednecks holed up in the West Virginia hills by quickly organizing and skillfully executing a slice-and-dice guerrilla attack.

Author Robert K. Tanenbaum edges dangerously close to negative stereotyping, however briefly, but by giving his portrait of the Vietnamese gang an historical and personal dimension, he deftly manages to avoid the conceptual trap that so often snares the US media. Vietnamese-Americans -- indeed, Asian-Americans in general -- are as complex and contradictory as any other ethnicity in America. Tanenbaum, formerly a successful career prosecutor in New York City who now lives in Beverly Hills, is well aware that Vietnamese-Americans are fundamentally no different from the waves of Irish, Germans and Italians that voyaged to America a century ago -- except perhaps in their overall diversity, especially in California, where the Asian community comprises more ethnic Koreans than anywhere

outside Korea; where the Chinese-American community is becoming a significant political force; where there are so many Vietnamese in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles, that one freeway exit sign reads: Little Saigon.

It is absolutely true that in America there are Asian gangs -- as Tanenbaum suggests -- every bit as violent and well organized as those Italian and Irish gangs of yore. And they get adequate publicity in the US media even as, statistically, they are a very tiny part of the overall true picture. But the American definition of news all but excludes the normal or the positive. The result is that the US media, on the whole, has not delivered the full picture of Asians.

There are precious few exceptions: One is The Register, Orange County's lead daily newspaper, which specializes in richly detailed local community coverage, and has a Vietnamese columnist who highlights the important contributions of the larger Asian community to the area's social, political and cultural life. There, an Asian-American does not have to be a gang-banger or social deviant to crack into the newspaper's pages. Rather, columnist Anh Do reports on the appointments -- to the California bench -- of the first Vietnamese-American woman and Korean-American woman, historic by any measure. Yet they were all but ignored -- or relegated to the back pages -- by much of the state's establishment media.

This practice of partial portraiture inadvertently fertilizes the acidic soil of anti-Asian discrimination and stereotyping. It was, after all, just a few years ago that the US media, led by no less than The New York Times, raised reader emotions about "Asian spying" with its campaign against Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos physicist who spent many dreary months in solitary confinement -- amid much congressional China-spy mongering -- before all but one minor charge was dropped. The media's role in creating poisonous public opinion is disturbing. (And the potential for a resurgence is ever present, not just with Asians but, most recently, with Muslims.) It will take many more artful blockbusters like Tanenbaum's "Absolute Rage" and many more responsible newspapers like The Register -- and undoubtedly countless more waves of Asian immigrants -- to undo the negativity about Asians planted in the national psyche.

The following weekly column has just appeared in the Honolulu Advertiser, The South China Morning Post and The Straits Times of Singapore. The author, Tom Plate, is a regular columnist at these three papers. The column also appears in other world newspapers, including The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Japan Times and The Korea Times. Email him at: tplate@ucla.edu.

For publication and reprint rights, contact the author directly or John Simpson (john.simpson@latsi.com) of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate International.

Bio Remarks: Tom Plate is a professor of Policy and Communication Studies at UCLA where he founded the Asia Pacific Media Network. He is a regular columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate International, the South China Morning Post, The Straits Times and the Honolulu Advertiser. He is a member of the World Economic Forum, the Pacific Council on International Policy and the author of five books. He has worked at TIME, the Los Angeles Times and the Daily Mail of London.

Previous Columns:

Crouching Asian Film Tigers to Slay Hollywood Dragon? (August 28, 2002)

Did The Devil Make President Chen Do It? (August 21, 2002)

The Hawaii-ization of Asia (August 14, 2002)

Travels With Colin (August 7, 2002)