Stuff I wanted to post before…
This is a bit late, but since nobody emailed me asking, I hope you all found what I was talking about.
I mentioned Bobby Lee’s Korean soap opera series (this is part 1, out of 4 parts — if you click through to Youtube you can see videos for the others in the sidebar):
… and I mentioned, for Chinese students, the racially-caricatured character “Short Round” in the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I mean this kid:
I suggested I would try to post a copy of the song I showed you in class, Berta Berta. here it is:
Here’s the scene in the film adaptation of the play The Piano where the song Berta Berta was performed, leading to its “repopularization.” If I had a copy of this movie, I’d definitely show it to you, but I don’t have one, unfortunately. If you can find a copy, let me know… it’s phenomenal for talking about some of the issues I’ve been trying to get you to talk about.
By the way, if you have a really strong stomach, and want more of an experience of seeing harsh caricature of Koreans–a tiny bit more of a sense of how it feels for an African-American seeing blackface performance, the Korea History Channel videos (like this one) are maybe a harsher example. I’m not recommending those videos as fun, though if I remember right, one of those guys is Korean-American. (I could be wrong but I thought I read that somewhere… does that make it better?)
One more: what do you make of this video–the intergenerational tension between immigrant father (sounds Cantonese) and his son, who is “acting too black”?