WILLIAM HUNG JUST WON'T DIE! (and other things worth noting)
- Emil Guillermo speaks up in SFGate.com.
David Ng drops his words in the Village Voice (thereby denying me the opportunity, lucky bastard).
Frankly, I wish both of them would have gone back and read Sharon's San Jose Metro piece on the phenom and taken a really deep breath.
Here's the deal: is part of Hung's popularity attributable to racism? Sure. I don't think many would deny that Hung, uncomfortably, registers in our cultural memory alongside folks like Long Duc Dong or Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's. But I don't think it's racism alone that explains his popularity ESPECIALLY among Asian Americans. Contrary to Ng's condescending attitude, it's not that APIs are starved for any kind of media representation and it's not that organizations like Guy Aoki's MANAA have stuck their "head up its ass." I think there's so much community love for him because he represents the earnest but awkward person in all of us, a person, I dare say, that APIs are INTIMATELY familiar with especially given the racist society we live in.
The difference is that Hung is naive, oblivious but seemingly sincere about who he is. He is "real" in other words, which makes him something more than a parody created by soulless executives to make profit off of. No doubt, soulless executives will make profit off of him but the reason Hung has struck a chord with so many is because he is NOT an invention but someone who comes across - in his countless interviews and performances - as entirely sincere about who he is, what he's out to do and the fact that none of this makes any damn sense.
I understand VERY WELL why many APIs are uncomfortable with Hung (especially Asian men). He's the embodiment of some of the worst stereotypical images we've had to deal with going back well over a century. But he's not a white actor in yellowface nor an API actor FOBbing it up. I think he's just putting himself out there which is exactly why people like him so much. Does racism fill San Diego malls with people shouting out his name? You'd have to be a pretty cynical bastard to really believe that Hung's entire fame is based strictly on racist love.
I also wonder if certain Asian men aren't uncomfortable with Hung out of their own self-image issues, ironic given the fact that Hung seems so unburdened by his own. I can certainly see how he'd trigger that kind of concern and derision but that's on the critic, not on Hung himself. What I think is most important about Hung's media presence is that what he puts out there is himself in all its rawness and that's part of what makes it painful to watch him at times, but it's also what he contributes. He's not as one-dimensional as his critics would paint but someone who is vulnerable, confused and joyful, all at once. When's the last time any of us have seen that in an Asian American media figure?
Either hell has frozen over or we've entered a brave new world. Bravo Sasha, bravo.
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