In 1980, when I was ten, my maternal grandmother finally
managed to emigrate from Vietnam to America (she’d been trying to do so for
years, since before the Vietnam War – or rather the American War, as it was and
is known in Vietnam – had ended).
Both my brother and I had known our maternal grandmother as babies, but
we had no recollections of her and it was as if we were meeting her for
the first time when she flew into Los Angeles that summer. (Embarrassingly, I can’t even remember
the woman’s name…chances are that her name consisted of three words and that
the first word, which would be the family name, was Nguyen.)
Vietnamese Grandma was ancient as fuck and she looked a lot
like a tree stump, and she died a few months later (of some sort of cancer, I
think). I’d only visited with her
a handful of times before she disappeared entirely into her hospice, and since
we had always needed an interpreter to communicate (she spoke no English; I spoke
no Vietnamese) we had never gotten to know each other much at all.
Vietnamese Grandma wasn’t just Vietnamese, she was also a
Buddhist, and so the funeral was a Buddhist funeral conducted in
Vietnamese. Vietnamese Grandma had
had a whole boatload of children, most of whom had been able to leave Vietnam,
and many of them were there in attendance with their families, and so it was a pretty
big crowd (though not a particularly Buddhist one). My brother and I were among the very few present who weren’t
100% Vietnamese.
Now, apparently, part of a Buddhist ceremony for the
departed involves the priest singing out a list of the names of all those gathered
– presumably the deceased’s family and friends, the people who are going to
mourn and remember her. And it
just so happens that tom is the Vietnamese word for “big shrimp” and that Ted
is extremely homonymic with the Vietnamese word for “little shrimp.” When the priest read, “So-and-so will
be missed by her beloved friends and relatives, including…Ted, Tom…” a wave of
titters (including some from my mom) swept through the congregation.
I didn’t speak or understand a lick of Vietnamese, and so I
wasn’t completely partaking of this mirth when it occurred. I understood that folks were laughing, of course, and I even felt a vague sensation of being implicated in the laughter, but I wasn’t privy to the joke. I hadn’t even noticed that my name and my brother’s
name had been mentioned among all of the Vietnamese names.
After the fact, my mother explained to me what had happened, and I remember being amused that Ted had played the little shrimp to my big shrimp (it seemed so appropriate…Ted was, after all, perceptibly shorter than me and he had always been such a sniveling little bitch, a total weakling who thought he was hot shit just because he got good grades and because he was White Grandma’s favorite and because he got more allowance than me simply because he was older…what a dick!). But although I didn’t understand the crowd’s pleasure as it was happening, I’ve always been delighted to have been the source of that pleasure. Why wouldn’t I want to bring some levity to what might otherwise be a strictly somber affair?
After the fact, my mother explained to me what had happened, and I remember being amused that Ted had played the little shrimp to my big shrimp (it seemed so appropriate…Ted was, after all, perceptibly shorter than me and he had always been such a sniveling little bitch, a total weakling who thought he was hot shit just because he got good grades and because he was White Grandma’s favorite and because he got more allowance than me simply because he was older…what a dick!). But although I didn’t understand the crowd’s pleasure as it was happening, I’ve always been delighted to have been the source of that pleasure. Why wouldn’t I want to bring some levity to what might otherwise be a strictly somber affair?
I mention all of this because I’ve been thinking a lot about race in recent weeks. I suppose
the big story has been the acquittal of George Zimmerman re his killing of
Trayvon Martin, the demonstrations in protest of that verdict, and the federal
government’s reaction to the public’s response. (Btw, I thought last week’s unannounced speech to the White
House correspondents was President Obama at his best, sober but passionate,
down-to-earth but eloquent…I wonder if/how his message might have differed were
he a descendent of slaves.) But
the story that’s been capturing my imagination even more lately, perhaps
because I’m Amerasian, has been KTVU’s mishandling of the story of the Asiana
Flight 214 crash and the aftermath of that mishandling.
You’re probably aware of the plane crash a couple of weeks ago at SFO (why the heck is
San Francisco’s int’l airport called "SFO" when "SFX" would sound so much cooler?). A flight from Asia, maybe Korea, came
in flying too low and too slowly and therefore hit some embankment that
separated the bay from the runway.
Some people died (although a surprisingly and encouragingly high
percentage of the 300+ aboard survived, many unscathed). The crash made national news and was
quite a sensation locally.
Everyone believed (and, I think, still do believe) that pilot error was
involved, but for the first day or two none of the news agencies knew the
pilots’ and crew members’ names, let alone whether authorities had gleaned any
information from them.
Then KTVU purported to break the Asiana pilots’ names. But all of the names were joke names,
such as Ho Lee Fuk and Sum Ting Wong and Wi Tu Lo. KTVU printed the names out on the screen for the viewer to see, and the anchorperson
read the names aloud. I think Bang
Din Ow was one of them (it struck me because Din sounded more Arabic than Asian
and didn’t sound enough like “then” and because Ow didn’t look
particularly Asian...although I've since learned that Ow is a variant spelling of Ou, which is a fairly common Asian surname). Within
seconds of the anchorperson’s reading of the names it was apparent that the
names must have been gag names and, of course, they were.
There was immediate public outcry. I didn’t have time to read or watch the news in the next few
days, but I think that KTVU’s explanation, which everyone accepted as truthful,
was as follows: (1) some intern, presumably with unprofessional intentions,
generated the names and passed them on to a KTVU supervisor, (2) the supervisor
fact-checked the names with an official federal aviation bureau of some sort,
(3) the federal aviation bureau, whether due to negligence or to mischief,
confirmed the names as accurate, (4) the supervisor passed the names off to the
news department’s line staff, who added the names to the newscast’s graphics
and teleprompter, and (5) it was only after the anchorperson read the names
aloud during the live broadcast that the gaffe was discovered.
In any case, the intern was promptly let go, as were three
of the news departments’ senior producers. I’m not going to apologize here for the intern (what a
jerk…thousands of people were anxiously waiting to find out what had happened
to their dead and injured loved ones…not cool, dude), but I think that the
firing of the producers was something of a small tragedy.
As anyone who’s ever worked in a face-paced environment
knows, professionals must rely on procedures (and the other people in positions
responsible for implementing those procedures) to prevent and rectify
errors. Perhaps better managers
would have identified a need for some extra layer of quality control, but this
was an honest mistake and I don’t think that multiple heads toward the top of
KTVU’s totem pole needed to roll.
Indeed, I think that these senior producers’ careers were sacrificed at the
altar of political correctness.
I guess the specific principle that I’m railing against here
is the principle that a captain is necessarily to blame whenever something bad
happens on his or her watch. But
there’s another principle against which I’d be willing to rail – namely, that
it’s necessarily wrong to make a mockery of foreign-sounding names.
Honestly…think of that Northern Alliance warlord named Mullah
Abdullah. Are you gonna tell me that that’s not funny? And how about that
Egyptian general, El-Sissi? C’mon!
Let me tell you one more story. It was the late 80s, it was the first few minutes of the
first day of Astronomy 101, and I was not happy to be there (I’ve always
suspected science to be bullshit…I think I was taking astronomy only in order
to avoid having to take physics).
The professor was looking down at the class roster on his lectern, taking
the first day’s roll, and he had gotten to the Ds: “Carla Dang? [“Here.”] Jason Dang?
[“Here.”] Philip Dang? [“Here.”]” The professor looked up from his roster, deadpan as a
motherfucker, and said, “It seems like the whole Dang family’s here.”
I thought it was absolutely hilarious. It literally filled my day, hitherto wearisome, with
joy. 25 years later, it sometimes
still makes me laugh. And I worry
that, today, an astronomy professor could never make that joke or other
similarly funny jokes. And this
makes me sad. And I’ll tell you
something else: it’s terrible that people suffer and die in plane crashes, but
“Sum Ting Wong” is still pretty funny (the other phony pilot names weren’t nearly as good).
Making fun of foreign-sounding words and names has enriched
my life on numerous occasions and it is part of my heritage and culture. It may not be sophisticated, but it’s
not necessarily overly mean-spirited and I think that people tend to get way
too bent out of shape about it.
Can we fully appreciate diversity if we aren't able to make fun of diversity?