Author Archives: Elizabeth Magpantay

1. In Apu’s Brown Voice: Cultural Inflection and South Asian Accents, by Shilpa Dave, there is a particular discussion about the accents of the South Asian population and more specifically the term brown voice. The term brown voice is explained as a trait that the South Asian population has that implies that they are foreign, and this trait is their accent or voice. To further explain this, we are given an example of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from the series, The Simpsons. He explains that in the show, there is a huge emphasis on how different he is compared to the other citizens and part of the reason for that is the accent he has. This accent is what creates that cultural difference and is what set Apu is a different category than the other citizens that surrounded him in the animation series.
2. “Apu’s flawed attempt to impersonate an American with a celebrity accent attaches him to an American cultural history and hence (in his mind) to an American cultural citizenship” (315). He explains this particular scene where Apu attempts to impersonate an American accent and he personally believes that he was able to do it successfully, which makes him believe that he is similar to everyone else because of his ability to do the accent. “But to the audience (including me) this is a humorous scene because we know Apu is not culturally American. In fact when we see Apu onscreen we expect him to speak English with an accent, namely what we have been taught to think of as an “Indian accent”” (315).  This explains how people expect Apu to have a particular distinction that makes him foreign, which is his accent. This shows the term brown nose which was brought upon in the article. The audience is automatically expecting him to have an accent because they know that his ethnic identity is different from the remaining characters.
3. The focused term for this article was “brown voice” which portrays the effect an accent has on the perception of someone. He explains that when someone has an accent, there is an automatic implication about that person being foreign, which he is able to show us through the character on The Simpsons, Apu.
4. This article reminded me of the the episode of All-American Girl that we watched in class. In this episode, her mother believed that there was a cultural difference between her and the remainder of her family. In this show, her family sees her as being “too American” due to her actions that she portrays in the show. In a similar way, South Asians are being portrayed by the community as foreign based only on their accent.

1. In Sarah Moon Cassinelli’s article, “If we are Asian, then are we funny?”: Margaret Cho’s All-American Girl as the First (and Last?) Asian American Sitcom, the author explains Margaret Cho’s role in the Asian American sitcom called All-American Girl. She explains that the show had the potential to accurately represent any minority figures, but due to the criticism that came from audiences about authenticity, they moved their focus more on ethnic authenticity rather than comedy. This show was focused on an Asian American family, and they weren’t capable of expressing that aspect so they focused more on the Asian aspect and that led to audiences seeing the show as “racist”. This portrayal lacked the aspect of an Asian American family as one single culture, instead showing it as two separate ones and that led the audience being uninterested and the showing being canceled.

2. The author mentions how the failure of the show even comes through while reading the title of it. “In this way, the show is mocking its Asian viewers and antagonizing its non-Asian audience by making it glaringly obvious that the Asian implication of the title is not worthy enough to be included” (135). With the balance of Asian culture and American culture, there were problems from the beginning which we can see from the title of the show. They weren’t capable of presenting an accurate depiction of this type of family in the context of the show as well as the title by only implementing American culture into it.

“The show seemed to overemphasize the characters’ Asianness marking the Asian face, body, and family structure as decidedly uncanny” (131). The depiction of this show was based on what they thought Asian’s should look like and followed the stereotypes that many people believe in.

3. The term Kim consistently uses throughout her article is authentic. The way she describes this term is being genuine and we can see in her article that the reason for the sitcom not being authentic is that they were constantly using stereotypes to describe and portray the characters.

4.  This article reminded me of the film we watched in class, Slaying the Dragon. Cassinelli explains how many stereotypes were used in this sitcom and in Slaying the Dragon, it gives us a look at Asian American actresses in Hollywood and the ways audiences stereotyped them. Audiences saw these Asian American actresses as something that they may not have always been and that is a close representation of this article.

1. In Beyond Finishing the Game: a Look at Asian American Grassroots Outreach, by John Fong, he states that the biggest challenge for Asian American cinema is finding a way for people to hear about it so that they will be intrigued to watch it. They have learned a way in which it is possible to do so, while it being affordable as well and this is through reaching out to communities and using them as an approach for marketing and getting the word out about these films.
2. An example that Fong gives to us where they used this strategy is in a Filipino American indie movie called The Debut. “Cajayon and producer John Castro spent several weeks in the Bay Area before the opening doing an immense amount of meetings and presentations to the area’s largest Filipino population, the target audience for the film” (6). They wanted to include the particular population in which could have related to the movie the most so that they would be more willing to watch it and this led to them going out of their way to find that population and converse with them about the film. This was related to an email newsletter that would send notifications to people when films would be coming out so they would be aware of when to watch it and their goal with this was to help increase the first weekend box office numbers so that trend would continue in following weekends (5). In the reading, it was explained how this strategy was very effective and they continued to use it along with creating other strategies that were more complex and effective. The complexity showed in the campaign for the film Better Luck Tomorrow, where they created a massive campaign that focused on the controversy the film portrayed. This led to young Asian Americans becoming intrigued due to their interest in being apart of a movement in which they could relate to, which is what the movie was about (8). The campaigns led them to want to be apart of something that stood up for their beliefs and that’s what that movie portrayed so this led to a larger amount of people watching the film.
3. In this reading, Fong continuously uses the word grassroots in relation to the campaigns that were being used for the release of these films targeted towards a particular community. In this case, the films’ campaigns targeted the Asian American community because of their representation in these films.
4. Crazy Rich Asians is the first film in 25 years to have an all-asian cast and many different people have been seeing it due to the movement it portrays relating to diversity. Similar to the film, Better Luck Tomorrow, this movie had a great turnout relating to the type of movement it portrayed in the film. Crazy Rich Asians was meant to be a movie that was shown on Netflix, and that company offered the makers of Crazy Rich Asians a large profit, but they turned it down because they knew that a movie that portrayed this type of movement had to be shown in theatres and now that it is out, it has been very successful with $25.2 million at theaters in North America in the first weekend alone.

1. In the reading, Assimilation, which is written by Lisa Sun-Hee Park, she gives us the many perspectives of Assimilation. She provides the different perspectives from different authors such as W.E.B Du Bois, Robert E. Park, Richard Alba, and Victor Nee. Along with each of their individual thoughts on assimilation, she gives us her own explanation of assimilation and how it should be interpreted. Assimilation is when the minority is forced into learning to better represent the majority in the specific location they may be present in. She also argues that Asian Americans are one of the many examples that are forced to assimilate and this usually occurs when those Asian Americans reside in the United States.
2. Park stated, “ According to this report, Asian Americans are model of assimilations, enjoying high educational achievement, good (white) neighborhoods, and interracial marriages to whites” (16) and this gives us the idea that once they are assimilated (into this white culture from the US) they are going to be apart of the same actions people from the US may partake in. An example provided is getting married to white people.
3. One of the key concepts in this reading that Park introduces and discusses is the model minority myth. The model minority is an idea that people who reside in the US strongly believe in and it states that Asians are the ones who should be seen as models for every other race. Any other race should attempt to shadow Asians when it comes to things such as their income or education because according to many people in the US, they do all of it the best out of any other race.
4. When it comes to the model minority myth, we can see many examples of that from a documentary watched in class called Slaying the Dragon. This film gives us an understanding of Asian Americans actresses in Hollywood and how people portrayed them in tv shows and movies. From this film, we can see that in a majority of these movies Asian American women were meant to play characters that were seen as evil , sexy, and mysterious and this is because this is how people expected Asian women to be. These Asian women were portrayed completely different than how they actually were.