K-TOWN Part 2- Accent Attack!

 

In this episode of K-TOWN, Jowe and Scarlet duke it out at a bachelor party, putting up their fists and taking their best shots in the form of… bad Asian accents. 

Let’s do a real quick recap: Jowe hates Scarlet, Scarlet hates Jowe. The gang have convened in a K-town club to celebrate Young’s bachelor party. There, things get heated as Korean-American Jowe and Chinese-American Scarlet begin to verbally and racially attack, the first in the video of which you can see from 00:20-00:26, where Jowe tells Scarlet to “Go to Chinatown”.

The next exchange starts at 3:23- 3:45,

Scarlet: Unless you point a d- at his a- then he’ll be like, oh, annyeonghaseyo.

Jowe: Hey, ni hao ma, nehga nehga xia. Okay, shut the f- up. Now you sound stupid.

I just find it interesting that these terrible-on-purpose imitations of the Chinese and Korean language are the go-to slams for these two Asian-Americans. This is an extremely similar phenomenon to what I had written about in my last K-TOWN post, where I observed that another ultimate, go-to slam for Asian American women was to accuse another woman of being fat (God forbid).  

 

 

What we have here in this showdown with Jowe and Scarlet is that racial stereotypes are used as a means of attack. We see this often enough as Asian Americans from other communities or majority populations, but it becomes even more worrisome and disturbing when I see two Asian Americans using those attacks against each other. I believe Asian against Asian hate is created when the Asian American individual is inundated by mainstream media and mainstream society with terrible stereotypes, caricatures, and assumptions made about other cultures, and then adopt this warped mindset for themselves. Stereotypes and the anger created out of cultural differences are thus made into fuel for attacks so displayed by Jowe and Scarlet. 

 

How can Asian Americans use such hate-filled and ignorant stereotyping that they know first-hand is incorrect? How can they take the assault that has haunted Asian American history for generations and turn that against one another?

Isn’t it enough as Asian Americans to be the subject of racial assault and cultural ignorance from mainstream media and ill-informed, majority thinking? Asian on Asian hate only takes the real, root problem of xenophobia and racism in America and pits it against each other. What we need to be doing is fighting that root problem, not adopting that hateful mentality. As Asian Americans, no matter what the ethnicity, we need to build a community of support and encouragement for each other, not participate in the very machine that oppresses us.