Blogosphere

L.A. blog for the angry Asian male *

An email correspondent caught me up with angryasianman.com by Phil Yu, a 27-year-old Korean American who was the subject of a story last month (!) in the Washington Post.

The refrain "That's racist!" also appears regularly -- sometimes half-jokingly, oftentimes not, when Yu stumbles upon what he views as stereotypical depictions of Asian Americans. But no, he's not actually that angry. He's just like a lot of other bloggers in the URL-littered landscape, a man who has something to say that he thinks other people aren't saying. Latinos have a right to be angry, blacks have a right to be angry -- why can't Asians be angry, too?

"I wanted to play with this idea of being 'angry,' to take on this persona of an Angry Asian Man, because we as Asians are not usually seen as an angry, militant, conscious group," Yu, a graduate student in the University of Southern California's cinema and television school, says by phone from his home in west Los Angeles. "That's the stereotype that's been attributed to us -- you know, the model minority -- so much so that we start to believe it ourselves."

Yu posts: "I'm not as angry as you think. Yes, racism angers me. But I'm not here sitting in front of the computer, hating whitey and plotting revolution. This is just a subject that has always interested me — pointing out racism and noting any and all appearances of Asians in mass media and popular culture (the good and the bad.)"

* Memo to me: check the dates: A reader pointed out that the Post story is two years old.


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