<p>This girl needs to be punished. This is very offensive and inappropriate. I go to an elite liberal arts school and things like this, which attack the safety and substance of the college, would not be accepted. At the least, she would be suspended for 2 semesters. She is creating an unsafe, and unwelcome environment at UCLA that should not be tolerated.</p>
<p>But this is UCLA, a very large school, so I don’t know what would happen. If they expel her, that might not be the worst idea, because it would make a statement out of her.</p>
<p>There need to be repercussions. “APOLOGY BECAUSE SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT SHE WAS DOING” is not acceptable whatsoever.</p>
<p>There need to be adequate consequences for her poor actions. If this massive university just ignores it, at least she will be shamed her entire life.</p>
<p>She is withdrawing from UCLA. As far as “creating an unsafe, and unwelcome environment at UCLA”, it appears that others have done exactly that in their responses to the video. Creating the video was offensive, but that pales next to death threats. I wonder how many of those who threatened her were outraged at the murder of Theo van Gogh?</p>
<p>Her racist statements are true. Who will believe her “planned” followup which may as well be a huge lie to lessen the embarassment and shame she is receiving. It is unacceptable.</p>
<p>She deserves the resulting unwelcome atmosphere that has come out. It shows how UCLA is not tolerant of this racist act.</p>
<p>What I said above was that her excuse that “she didn’t know what she was doing” is complete BS. She planned all along to create several videos and a blog singling out Asians as responsible for inappropriate cell phone use in the library. </p>
<p>I’m basically agreeing with you…except that she deserves to feel unsafe because of the death threats. That part makes the death threat issuers about as bad as her…</p>
<p>As a parent, what would your response be if your daughter told you she wanted to buy the domain “Asians on their Cell Phones in the Library”?<br>
That would certainly make me spit out my morning coffee. Too bad somebody didn’t sit up straight and say “Woa” before the girl insulted an entire community and changed the course of her own life.</p>
<p>Whose foreign speech? David So commented on this in his video. Wallace demonstrates her ignorance of Mandarin but then proceeds to talk about the tsunami, which hit Japan. Japanese sounds nothing like Mandarin. In particular, it has no “-ng” sounds. 'Course, to be fair, Wallace may have honestly thought that ALL Asian languages sound like “ching chong ling long ting tong”; after all, when you don’t know any of them, they all sound like noise and thus the same.</p>
<p>Again, this goes back to my complaint about “perpetual foreigners” who are somehow not proficient in English. There are actually non-offensive ways to poke fun at the way someone speaks, but for it to be non-offensive, a necessary condition is that it must be said in a way that presumes that the person KNOWS English. What do I mean by that? Take Russell Peters’s comedy for example. When he does foreign English accents, he pretty much always says correctly phrased English, just with a strong accent depending on who he’s making fun of.</p>
<p>When David So said “It’s not the same thing!” while commenting on Wallace’s confusing Chinese with Japanese, he said it the way Peters does when Peters makes fun of Chinese people. In particular, “It’s not the same thing!” is said in a Cantonese English accent. But note that it is grammatically correct; it is just said with a non-American English accent. Likewise, when Peters makes fun of his dad or Indians in general, I don’t think he ever uses grammatically incorrect English. It’s always correctly phrased, just said with an “Indian” accent. A possible exception would be “Somebody gonna get hurt real bad,” but that’s not true broken English.</p>
<p>True broken English is where it gets plain ol’ offensive. That’s The Daily Princetonian’s ill-conceived bag on Jian Li four years ago. And acting like the person can’t speak English or saying meaningless gibberish like “ching chong ling long ting tong” is no different.</p>
<p>Fabrizio,
Thank you for your thoughtful posts. I read them with interest because it is an opportunity to learn from someone who has first hand experience. I agree with your assessment of the broken english vs. correct English but I think it is even more than that. It’s the contempt that shows when someone recites gibberish as a substitute for a true language. It’s just disrespectful and implies that the Asian language (Chinese, I guess she was shooting for?) is less “real” and legitimate than the English language. The disdain is palpable.</p>
<p>fab,
I feel that you and others are way overthinking the accuracy of Wallace’s comments. There was an 5.0+ earthquake in China just a day or so before the big one in Japan. So I think she is referring to the jumbled events that occurred around that time: China earthquake/Japan earthquake/China tsunami warning/Japan tsunami. I don’t think she really knew or cared which language was being spoken or which particular event was being inquired about, just that some “Asians” were speaking in a foreign language on their cell phones about the “tsunami” in the library. Yes, I agree that what she said was offensive because after reading this thread I know about the “ching chong” epithet, and I also agree with this:</p>
<p>I am not around Asians. I can guess if I see one who is Chinese, Japanese or Korean, etc. I clearly cannot diffrerentiate between the languages. They do sound similar, as in “I am not familiar with the language”.</p>
<p>If one is not exposed to the language, how can you condemn someone for not knowig the difference?</p>
<p>I think EPTR nailed it on the head: “It’s the contempt that shows when someone recites gibberish as a substitute for a true language. It’s just disrespectful and implies that the Asian language (Chinese, I guess she was shooting for?) is less “real” and legitimate than the English language.”</p>
<p>As I said, there are ways to make fun of the way someone talks that are less offensive. When Russell Peters makes fun of immigrant groups, he seldom speaks in broken English. It’s almost always properly phrased English but with a strong accent depending on the immigrant group.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t condemn someone for not knowing the difference between a group of similar languages. I can’t tell if someone is speaking Swedish or another Scandinavian language. What is offensive is the implied assumption that they are all the same, kind of a “whatever, they are all alike anyway, who cares…” attitude. It is dismissive and condescending.</p>
<p>Sorry you feel it’s condescending and dismissive. I cannot control your feelings. It is not my intent, but again, if I do not have any exposure to Asians, I cannot tell the difference. I am not hearing the languages spoken at any time. To my untrained ear, I would not be able to tell the difference.</p>
<p>Silvermoonlock,
I wasn’t saying that you were condescending and dismissive. I understand when someone can’t differentiate between similar languages. What I meant was that it is dismissive and condescending to act as if it is all the same, as if it doesn’t matter. I wasn’t accusing you of that.</p>
<p>The whole ‘ching-chong’ things isn’t merely an imitation of a foreign language, it’s a long-held mockery of Asians, no matter what their ethnicity or language.</p>
<p>You could be an Asian of Viet, Japanese or Fil descent and the ‘ching-chong’ mockery would be thrown your way, whether that’s in the playground of primary schools or at the workplace.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Give me a break; Japanese, Korean and Mongolian sound little like Mandarin and even less like Cantonese (being Altaic languages).</p>
<p>It would be like thinking German sounded similar to French or Italian.</p>
<p>It’s not like I have been exposed to Japanese or Mandarin/Cantonese than what the typical American has been exposed to and the diff. is quite noticeable (just as German is from French or Spanish).</p>
<p>Not being able to distinguish btwn Japanese and Mongolian or Mongolian and Turkish, now that’s an entirely diff. matter (and would be similar to the Scandinavian analogy).</p>