<p>As a fluent Mandarin speaker, someone who has studied the Chinese language on some level, and knows many native speakers of other Chinese dialects, this is complete nonsense. </p>
<p>What she really did was to use racist taunts commonly used in schoolyards and other areas of the US for at least the last 60+ years. </p>
<p>Taunts made up by English speaking racists who felt the need to put down the Chinese/Chinese-Americans or other Asian/Asian-Americans since “we all look the same to them”.</p>
<p>Btw, I am not suggesting that anyone be required to stop speaking a foreign language in order to be accepted as an American. Rather, I am setting forth a theory for why such people might be assumed to be foreigners.</p>
<p>Another way to cope would be to simply stop being offended by the “foreigner” label. Is it an insult to be presumed to be a Chinese national? Maybe it is, I can’t speak to that. If someone presumed me to be a European, I wouldn’t be offended.</p>
<p>My niece attended a public high school in Irvine, and according to her, Chinese was commonly spoken in the halls of her school. Why would you assume that these same students would not also speak Chinese once they arrived at UCLA?</p>
<p>The way Wallace went about doing it clearly shows her motives are not to “imitate Asian speech patterns”, but to use a racist taunt which has had a long history of use all across America…including California from what my Cali-based cousins experienced during the 60’s-80’s as schoolchildren. </p>
<p>Watching that video made me wonder whether I stepped back in time to the 1980s and before when openly using racist epithets and taunts was acceptable to the point it was openly tolerated by some teachers and many adults.</p>
<p>Bay, I’m having a little trouble following your posts and reasoning. Are you in any way excusing this young woman’s rant? Or are you just arguing, sort of in the abstract, that imitating/mocking another language is not necessarily bigoted?</p>
<p>Ah, you may be right. But I still think she was also imitating their foreign speech. If they had all been saying things like, “Oh my god mom are you all right? How is the house? etc” I honestly do not think she would have used the epithets, but I could be wrong.</p>
<p>To my mind, it really doesn’t matter what precipitates a racist rant that includes that “ching chong” taunt. (And btw, just because a person has never heard of ching chong or the “n” word before, it doesn’t mean that ching chong and the “n” word aren’t offensive, racial taunts.) Even if a bevy of assorted Asian students surrounded poor, epiphany-starved Alexandra Wallace in the library singing arias from the Mikado into their cell phones, that’s just irritating. A “no talking on cell phones in the library” sign and a vigilant work-study library aide could fix that without hurting anybody. What Alexandra Wallace did, on the other hand, was hurtful and mean, premeditated and intentional, and therefore not in the irritating ballpark. It is not equivalent. It is not justified. It is not innocuous because racism is never innocuous. And I, for one, am happy to learn that she perceived that the entire community had ostracized her. I think it is important for the Asian students toward whom the rant was directed to know that the community does not tolerate this sort of garbage.</p>
<p>alh,
When I wrote the former paragraph about Wallace imitating Chinese speech, I was talking about it in the context of the “perpetual foreigner” concept, and that it is likely that there are Chinese - speaking students at UCLA - as indicated by Wallace’s imitation of their phone calls.</p>
<p>And yes, I think that if the “Asians” on their cell phones that Wallace was imitating had been speaking English, she would not have said “Ohhh, ching chong ling long ting tong, Ohhh,” rather she would have said something like “Ohhh, are you all right, etc Ohhh.” I do not perceive her to be mentally quick enough to have substituted the foreign epithets for English in her imitation, but of course I could be wrong. That is just my impression.</p>
<p>Are you saying you find the “ching chong”, which has been explained to be a long time insult, inexcusable but another sort of imitation might be okay in your mind?</p>
<p>Bay, I am also having hard time following you. If I may present an analogy: what if she had spoken in an “ebonics” style jibberish with the same type of rant toward African Americans? Then would you say that that was offensive?</p>
<p>No offense intended, but it appears that some people are having a difficult time understanding how degrading and insulting it is for Asian people to hear that type of taunting.</p>
<p>alh,
The act of imitating a foreign language or accent is neutral. In context, it can be done for comedy, or just to recount an experience (neutral) or it can be done to make fun of others (mean). I feel like I already expressed my views about this at the beginning of this thread.</p>
<p>I agree that recounting an experience can be neutral. If I repeat to my husband what a foreign friend told me, in her exact words in her own language in an effort to give him the full effect, my accent will be unintentionally atrocious (both because I learned the language as an adult and because I’m just really bad at learning languages) but my intent is neutral. If I imitate her saying something in accented English, is this neutral? I certainly wouldn’t do it to her face.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t mind if she heard me attempting to repeat something she said in her own language. But I would hope she would be kind about my accent ;)</p>