In Lauren Yee’s Ching Chong Chinaman, she writes the play in a way that balances humor and the critiques of Chinese American stereotypes. In her play, she emphasizes the racist and offensive language that most Americans use when stereotyping Asians and Asian Americans.
One scene that touched me specifically was the part where the Wong family was trying to pronounce J’s name and instead of pronouncing it like “JIN-qiang”, the father pronounced it as “Ching Chong.” (Yee, 10) People usually view this as offensive language, one to mock Asians and Asian Americans and their accents and names. I especially resonated because of the dread that comes when people try to pronounce my name. My name is spelled uniquely so people often pronounce it incorrectly. In Chinese, it’s pronounced differently than how people pronounce it in America. The x sound is hard for people to pronounce so most people resort to pronouncing it as Jin, Shin, or Zin. To make it easier for people to pronounce, I usually just go with their pronunciation or correct it to Zin. However, whenever my friends hear other people try to pronounce my name and they hear Jin or Shin, they would make fun of it. I don’t think they realize how offensive it can be even though they are also of the same ethnicity. Reflecting back on my own experiences kind of answers the question of whether or not you can be racist to your own race. My answer would be that some people are racist towards their own race.
One example of this sort of racism is how the Wong family is ethnically Chinese but they are so Americanized that they cannot assimilate with their Chinese side. They couldn’t even pronounce J’s name or know what Chinese people eat and how they behave. They have lost all of their Chinese cultures and instead acts as if they are not themselves associated to be Asian. In the play, Desdemona says “We need return him to his natural environment. We don’t know anything about his diet, his lifestyle, his basic wants. We don’t even have the right sensitivity training to even begin to cater to his needs as a displaced person.” (Yee, 11) Her remarks on J and his situation can be interpreted as humorous yet offensive because it’s weird to say that they need to return J to his natural environment as if he were some animal that needs to be sent back to where he came from so that he can survive. It’s mocking J yet it’s also humorous in how unaware Desdemona and the rest of the family is of their own identity.
Another scene that I personally found humorous yet offensive was when Grace was struggling to ordering Chinese takeout on the phone. She ended the call by saying “doomo arigato…thank you.” (Yee, 15) She said thank you in Japanese and English but it was a Chinese restaurant that she was ordering from. Yee uses this scene to highlight how stereotypical people can be when they think of Asians, they usually refer to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean but Asia is such a big continent, with many different countries, each one different from the other.
Personally, this play highlighted a lot of the different stereotypes and offensive language that we encounter in our lives but Lauren Yee balances it out with humor to make it less serious. Her choice of language and characters really helped to highlight the problems of society.
I found myself really enjoying your work and relating to the part especially where you mention how your name was a source of hardship. I also have a name that is hard to pronounce, so rather than fixing people’s pronunciation constantly, I just started to go by an English name. I also really liked your statement about how Asians are constantly placed under one big stereotype when in truth, there are many different types.
Your experience with people mispronouncing your name is one that resonates with many people in America, and I believe this issue has also heavily influenced my parents to choose the name that they have picked for me. My parents immigrated to NYC from China, and they ended up asking others to pick an American name for me, and at the moment I didn’t quite understand that. I thought it was silly that my name was chosen from a book of names, but I soon realized that they chose an American name for me because they wanted me to easily assimilate into America. It’s disheartening to see that even back then, cultural names were being mispronounced and people had no intention of pronouncing them correctly.