Asians in the Library

In March of 2011 I watched what has become the now infamous video by Alexandra Wallace, a third-year political science major who shamelessly posted a YouTube rant about Asians in the library at UCLA during finals week.  Her video instantly provoked an Internet contagion, as millions logged on and reacted with tolerance-based horror to her bashing monologue.  Thousands of responses proliferated, some dissenters distinguishing themselves by being more eloquent than others, and the most noteworthy voice—I think, because of its artfulness—was the satiric “Ching Chong Asians In The Library Song” sung by Jimmy Wong, which has drawn over 4 million viewers and counting. Wallace’s rant left me angry, so as I listened to Wong’s song I was hoping that my emotions would be soothed and that I would be able to move on to other significant matters.

But for the past year my mind has continued to circle back and dwell with an almost unhealthy obsession on the dialogue between Wallace and Wong. Why did Wallace’s words and her complaints create such a backlash of online activity that hasn’t yet ceased? Why had Jimmy Wong’s sensitive yet humorous crooning received so much attention? And why did I feel almost personally invested in what had been happening?

Alexandra Wallace’s rant lasts a brief two minutes and fifty-two seconds. She speaks from a dorm room, wearing a scanty, taut pink-trimmed top, inciting objection within moments by saying: “The problem is these hordes of Asian people that UCLA accepts into our school every single year, which is fine, but if you’re going to come to UCLA then use American manners.”

Any listener instantly knows that Wallace is out-of-step, not part of the tolerant, more-enlightened generation she’s supposed to belong to, while for a middle-aged Chinese-American like me, the word “hordes” and phrase “our school” bring to mind California’s anti-Chinese immigration laws and overall climate of discrimination from the 1860s.  Wallace also made me think of the evolving history of enrollment policies at UCLA.  Since Proposition 209 in California in 1996 banned state entities from using affirmative action, or since the admissions playing field was “leveled” by becoming based upon standardized test scores alone, Asian-Americans have emerged as front-runners in West coast academia. UC Berkley’s Asian population jumped from 37.3% in 1995 to 48.6% today, and at UCLA, Asians are now a majority at 37.12%.  Wallace’s old-school centrist view assumes that UCLA should be white.  This was the reason why Caucasians protested affirmative action to begin with, but they had no idea that the policy’s removal would lead to Asians being admitted in vast numbers.

Wallace’s litany of complaint moves on like a filibuster:

…all the Asian people that live in all the apartments around me, their moms and their brothers and their sisters and their grandmas and their grandpas and their cousins and everybody that they know that they’ve brought from Asian with them, comes here on the weekends to do their laundry, buy their groceries and cook their food for the week. It’s seriously, without fail. You will always see old Asian people running around this apartment complex every weekend.  That’s what they do. They don’t teach their kids to fend for themselves.

I felt astonished that Wallace was striking down a core value of Asian-America, critiquing family togetherness.  She was also inverting a major Asian route to gain independence by criticizing high scholastic achievement with the support of one’s family, completely misunderstanding the reason for close-knit multi-generational behavior.

What follows is the emotional locus of Wallace’s rant for she remarks with an annoying whine that has the impact of trauma, commenting snidely about Asians talking on their cell phones in the library:

I’ll be in, like deep into my studying, into my political science theories and arguments and all that stuff, getting it all down, like typing away furiously—blah blah blah—and then all of a sudden when I’m about to, like, reach an epiphany, over here from somewhere, "Ooohh, ching chong ling long ting tong, ooohh."

There is the underlying comic irony that Wallace will never be able to escape from now—the doubt of whether she’s even capable of having a real epiphany because she’s ignorant enough to be so openly racist—and then there’s her rendition of Chinese speech, which otherizes an entire race, and in so doing, she attains the level of Roland Barthes’ definition in Mythologies of what otherizing is, which ultimately is to conquer or destroy.  At the same time Wallace is simplifying what is actually a complex tonal language by trying to parody it with an old sing-song rhyme, and this type of broad stroke harkens back to stereotypical portrayals of Asians that used to dominate racist Hollywood movies.  

Still Wallace presses the issue further, exclaiming about one Asian talking on a cell phone:

Are you freaking kidding me?  In the middle of finals week? So being the polite, nice American girl that my momma raised me to be, I kinda just give him what anybody else would do, that kinda, like—(she puts her index finger up to her lips in a ‘ssshh’ motion)—you know, it’s a library, like, we’re trying to study.  Thanks! And then it’s the same thing five minutes later.  But it’s somebody else, you know.  I swear they’re going through their whole families, just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing.

By this point I could only wonder, how can this woman possibly be speaking openly like this?  Not only was she assuming some far flung superiority because she’d been raised by a white mother, but the idea of her being an exclusively American girl, or that her type of behavior must remain as the upheld standard for everyone, struck me not only as outlandish but disturbing.  Could anyone really be so self-involved and insensitive toward the plight of families of tsunami victims, not to mention confuse what occurred in Japan with the predominantly Chinese student body at UCLA?  But this is life according to Alexandra Wallace, a former want-to-be swimsuit model, lacking any civilized awareness, without any greater concern for the shrinking “postmodern” planet that we’re all supposedly citizens of; no, she couldn’t refrain from speaking with her sense of entitlement to target Asians in the library.  And what other building or space on a college campus is more necessary to scholarly upward mobility, to achieving the American dream?  Yet without a moment of regret or reservation, she goes on to thank everyone for listening, and closes with a smug “and have a nice day.”

Although I loathe Alexandra Wallace’s sense of privilege and her assumption of ownership of the library, I still think that she couldn’t have anticipated the furor that she would cause.  She can certainly be viewed as one of Asian-America’s strongest indications that having the first African-American President, Barrack Obama, does not—on so many levels—signify that we are now part of an entirely enlightened post-racial nation.  African-Americans have already been quite aware that deep faults remain throughout the nation and that for many, Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of racial equality is still no more than a fallacy; this was confirmed by the July 16, 2009 arrest of the nation’s pre-eminent African-American scholar, Henry Louis Gates, who teaches at Harvard but was detained by police under suspicion of burglary while trying to enter his own Cambridge home.  For me, Wallace’s rant parallels the treatment Gates was subjugated to; she reminds us that no matter how much another race believes it has attained, no matter how it believes it has progressed, there is still always the dominant status quo that will question one’s right to belong.

What Wallace also proved, unfortunately, is that not only is racism still to be feared in the form of law enforcement officers who racially profile, or Klu Klux Klansmen, or skinheads, but now racism can blatantly arise from what has traditionally been perceived as the supposedly innocuous good girl who invokes how she was raised by her mother.  Isn’t this the girl who far too many in America are conditioned by media forces to want to desire or want to marry?  Think Marilyn Monroe in her billowing white dress, posed classically above a steam grate, or Farrah Fawcett with her dazzling white smile and red swimsuit, emblazoned in the American consciousness for eternity.  Remember the bombshells Jayne Mansfield and Kim Novak? Or more recently Heidi Klum, Jessica Simpson, Jessica Alba, and Britney Spears?  Alexandra Wallace, of all things, raises the question: Isn’t blondeness supposed to represent the locus of desire, associated with wholesome youth, vitality, and sexuality? Isn’t it an American truism that to be with a blonde is a prize or a reward, something only those more masculine or wealthy or fortunate than others can attain?

I have thought back, and what I remember is that from 1982 to 1983, during my sophomore and junior years at the University of New Hampshire, I ensconced myself until closing each night on the uppermost floor of the Diamond Library, reading English Literature—the Brontë sisters for one course—as well as classic American novels for another: As I Lay Dying, The Country of the Pointed Firs, The Great Gatsby, My Antonia, and A Farewell to Arms.  The library became a refuge, a sanctum from roommates and parties, and since I had been an athlete in high school (running cross-country, playing basketball, and running track) which demanded every extra hour, now my mind was compensating, catching up for what I felt like were mental deficiencies.  And I remember that since my older brother was a child prodigy, a classical pianist, there was always music resounding throughout the house, the volume at times deafening, never conducive to reading, so there in the library I was also learning about quiet and where silence can lead one’s mind and thoughts.  I discovered the far-reaching realm of literature in the library, contemplating who I was by comparing myself to the characters in the worlds created by each novel’s author, and as it was I could have stayed long past closing time. I can not imagine how I would have felt if someone like Alexandra Wallace had told me I shouldn’t be there or had to leave.

* * * * * *

Jimmy Wong’s video response to Alexandra Wallace features him singing solo with an acoustic guitar, sometimes utilizing four concurrent screens to show images of him singing lead, singing his own backup chorus, hand clapping, or rhythm shaking.  When interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered by Melissa Block, he speaks of needing a couple of days to write “Ching Chong Asians in the Library Song,” which from the start is a mock seduction.

Wong’s song opens with nerdy fictive self-deprecation; he pretends not to speak English well, laying on a thick heavy accent, satirizing Wallace’s characterization of Asians.  He becomes, to a heightened degree, the Asian other she makes the Asians in the library out to be.  His eyes appear serious and he bows his head, but the real humor commences when he starts to speak enticingly:

Oh, Alexandra Wallace.  Damn, girl. You so feisty. You so feisty they should call you Alexandra Great Wall Ace. And don't pretend I didn't see you watching me talking on my phone yesterday all sexy—ching chong wing wong. Baby it's all just code. It's the way I tell the ladies it's time to get funky.

Underlying all of this is the ingenious subtext of hearing an Asian man speak provocatively to a blonde white woman, which I can not recall hearing or seeing at any time recently on television or at the movies.  Here Wong is not the typically emasculated Asian male, but a young man restructuring any perceived hierarchy of gender or racial desire: his speaking out, satire or not, is a form of rebellion.  What appeals most to me is how he mocks how he’s supposed to want Wallace, while it’s righteously overt that he doesn’t really want her.  He rejects American’s elevation of blonde beauty.  Wong launches into singing the first verse without an accent, sometimes lifting his eyebrows dramatically, and Wallace remains the object of seduction:

I hope one day you can meet my mother, brothers, sisters, 

grandmothers, grandpas, and cousins, oh, cuz 

what they’re really doing on those Friday nights

is showing me how to cook and dress, cuz baby

I want to take you out and blow your freaking mind.

The chorus follows, laced with its own insults to contradict Wallace’s rant: “And underneath the pounds of makeup and your baby blue eyes, I know there’s a lot of pain and hurt, for such a big brain to spend all night studying poly sci.”

The rest of the chorus is Wong’s revisionist interpretation of what her racist portrayal of Chinese speech means to him; he takes the standard of racial debasement that she makes from Chinese language, and appropriates it for his own riff of mocking humor:

                   I pick up my phone and sing:

                   Ching chong, it means I love you

                   Ling long, I really want you

                   Ting tong, I don’t actually know what that means.

                   Ching chong, it’s never ending

                   Ling long, my head is spinning

Ting tong, still don't know what that means.

                     

Wong’s accentuating Wallace’s crude imitation of Asian speech in the chorus—her “ching chong ling long ting tong”—also prompts Melissa Block in her NPR interview to speculate whether ching chong ling long ting tong might “become part of our cultural lexicon” or like “a shorthand” for something.  As Block suggests, the words have become part of our language; you can now find ching chong ling long being reshaped in a myriad of online postings and even printed on T-shirts being sold for tsunami relief.

Wong maintains the high level of inverse satire for his song returns to spoken word verse and becomes humorously seductive again:  “Oohh, Alex.  I just want to take my phone out and talk dirty to you all day long.  But I know you’re busy cramming all those big hard theories and arguments.”  He gives the camera a sly wink, and then the second verse commences:

                   You ain’t that polite, nice American girl

                   that your momma raised you to be

                   so when you reach that epiphany

                   —wait, are you freaking kidding me?—

                   if you have an epiphany every single time you study

                   that probably means you’re doing something wrong

                   but I like it when you’re wrong.

The song unleashes racial protest here, as well as irritation directed at Wallace’s assumed authority and intelligence, and then the chorus is repeated before Wong speaks enticingly for one last time, amplifying the seduction with phallic sexual humor:

               

It’s alright, Alexandra, I know you know nothing about tsunamis

I just want to make sure you know that it’s not a type of sushi

but I came here to say that I’m actually Chinese

and that’s a whole ‘nother country, and it’s bigger

yeah, way bigger, but when it comes to love, Alexandra

there are no boundaries.

To close Wong says “Thank you” in the formal Chinglish voice of the opening, faintly echoing Wallace’s “and have a nice day.”  During his NPR interview, he describes his song as containing “sharp wit” but downplays his reaction to Wallace by remarking, “I was pretty offended at first, but then I realized this is just someone going on a rant, and we’ve all done that before.”  He adds that his song, like Wallace’s rant, is never really hostile, and claims that he would “love to meet her for coffee and give her a big hug.”  While praising Wong’s non-violent creative response, however, reporter Dave Pell on NPR’s Technology Blog links Wallace to cyberbullies, reminding us “just how easy it is to spread hate in the Internet age.”

For me there is a discernible element of tragedy beneath Wong’s having to use satire to respond to Wallace, the feeling of laughing and crying at the same time, which I think is the most significant aspect contributing to why the song has drawn and captivated so many listeners.  Wallace’s rant does sadden our emotional human landscape.  And while the insulting lyrics in Wong’s song are barbs for Wong’s being part of the intended audience for Wallace’s derogatory generalizations, why shouldn’t he just admit that and feel justified?

In the aftermath of Alexandra Wallace’s online rant, in her real day-to-day life, she and her family have received death threats.  Soon after, she issued an apology, stating: “I cannot explain what possessed me to approach the subject as I did, and if I could undo it, I would… For those would cannot find it within them to accept my apology, I understand.”  She simultaneously announced her withdrawal from UCLA.  One recent article suggests her video was a publicity stunt because her career as a political science major apparently held no more promise than Sarah Palin’s bridge to nowhere.  A glimpse at Wallace’s bathing suit modeling photos, which are posted prominently online, shows what appears to be fearless self-promotion; Wallace stares down the camera like she knows what she’s doing and thrives upon it, like she possesses great self-awareness.  If her rant was for publicity, however, it certainly backfired, because she branded herself with a “racist” label, and what racists do we know of who have managed full career comebacks?

Examining Greek history, we can find that Wallace is akin to Julian the Apostate, who, after the reign of Constantine, reinstated the pagan religion of Rome as the state religion, and so the protection of minority Christians—like any security Asian-Americans might have felt at UCLA—was nullified.  We could view her symbolically, then, as a sign of one historical tradition stubbornly refusing to give way to another.  If I apply a more contemporary lens, she reminds me of the late Governor George Wallace of Alabama, who was the face of modern Southern segregation.  One of the more horrific quotes attached to him is: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”  When he recanted later in life, history certainly didn’t lessen its judgment of how awful he was.

While we can recognize that Alexandra Wallace’s rant was a clear overestimation of her own power, what her actions ultimately tell us is that not only can racism stem now from what American popular culture has repeatedly tried to tell us is the simplest, most desirable iconic identity—the attractive blonde female—but also that the assumed privilege of white America, and its once clearly dominant and unjust advantage, is becoming diluted and fractured and strained, possibly nearing a breaking point.

Thanks to Alexandra Wallace, America must acknowledge that the wholesome blonde California girl in the white swimsuit may no longer represent good vibrations. Asian-America’s empowered voice is found in the thousands of responses and millions of hits for the clever crooner Jimmy Wong, the face of a race in retaliation, one that is no longer the silent minority that many of the status quo would like it to remain. Wallace probably wasn't the last innocuous blonde to protest Asian success by trying to subvert an entire ethnic group's version of the American dream. So we should caution our mother, brothers, sisters, grandmothers, grandpas, and cousins, because Wallace’s rant is the portent of more Asian-vilifying times ahead. As for me, I'll be doing my part by reading in coffee shops, parks, museums, airports, on trains, and in libraries, forever staying visible.

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