NBC's Eurocentric Coverage Of The Opening Ceremony Makes Me Mad.

I've been sitting in front of the TV for nearly three hours. It is now almost midnight. I'm eagerly awaiting the entrance of the Taiwanese (Chinese Taipei) team into Olympic Stadium. In the meantime I've had to suffer through the seemingly endless list of nations I've never heard of march past my screen. Comoros?

As we wind down the S's, I can see on the convenient little ticker at the bottom of the screen that Taiwan is coming up. I just need to get past Syria and we're there. After the commentators make some useless observations about the civil war in that country, the Taiwanese team starts entering the left side of my TV. Then..we cut to a commercial. What the hell?

Taiwan doesn't have a small team. They are entering 44 athletes at the Olympics. Yet they are not given the live face time awarded much smaller countries like Liechtenstein and Bosnia/Herzegovina. Now that I think about it, I think virtually every Western European country was shown live while most of the countries given snippets of video were non-Western. Some Eastern countries are too big for NBC to ignore. Of course they had to show China and India. With a combined population of over 2 billion people they don't want to piss off a third of the world's population.

Though Taiwan is small country, it is one of the United States' largest trading partners. The little island is so important to us that we actually have a law that mandates our protection of Taiwan from its larger neighbor, even by war if necessary. Yet NBC made us sit through images of the beautiful people from tiny countries like Monaco and Luxembourg while ignoring Taiwan, a small country with a real chance of winning medals in multiple sports, okay badminton and table tennis.

So NBC, since you have a monopoly on airing the Olympics in the U.S., it is your duty to show all the diversity of countries that participate at this illustrious event. Even though most of your directors and cameramen are Caucasian, please give smaller non-Western countries some more screen time. Who knows? You might actually attract more viewers to your expensive programming.

Ted And The Paranoia Of Reading Asian American Blogs

Asian American blogs are great. They are wonderful resources that I wish I had when I was growing up. Being raised in the Midwest, I had no clue about the events affecting AA's around the country. There was a distinct feeling of isolation, as if I was the only person going through this Asian American reality. Now there is a whole universe of websites and blogs posted by other AA's who I can relate to and gain insight into my own experience.

However be careful what you wish for. Blogs like Angry Asian Man publicize the wonderful achievements of AA's but they also frequently write about the ugly side of discrimination in America. Whether the discrimination is overt or intentional, this steady torrent of racist acts against AA's soon started making me paranoid. Did somebody just make a racist remark to me at work? Was I passed up for a promotion because I'm Asian? Did somebody just cut me off on the road because I'm not white? Or are all these feelings just in my head and I'm overthinking situations?

I recently saw the movie Ted. I loved that movie. I hadn't laughed so hard in the theater in a long time. There is a scene in the movie though that made me feel uncomfortable. During the party scene, Flash Gordon punches a hole in the apartment wall clear through to the adjacent apartment. Who is on the other side? An Asian dude holding a live duck. He starts screaming at the partiers in thick Chinglish claiming he was about to cook the duck for dinner. Mayhem ensues. Granted Seth MacFarlane's claim to fame is his offensive humor directed at all races, religions, and sexual orientation. See his TV show "Family Guy" for an example. But during "Ted" I couldn't help but laugh self-consciously and uncomfortably at the chaos on screen. Isn't this a little too racist for the 2010's. Would the audience laugh as hard if they showed a black person getting ready to eat fried chicken?

I used to laugh at Asian characters in other movies that are now considered racist. Remember the infamous Long Duk Dong in "Sixteen Candles"? The play on Asian sounding names as well as his foreignness are clearly there to get cheap laughs from a Western audience. Another famous Asian movie person was the Japanese guy Takashi in "Revenge of the Nerds." Again, his obvious foreign accent and cluelessness about Americans is played for laughs.

Funny I never felt funny about laughing at those characters, along with the audience, at that time. I never realized how racist movie parts can be hurtful. It was not until I watched "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" that I first saw how racist Hollywood could be. Bruce was sitting in the theater with his white girlfriend watching "Breakfast at Tiffany" when one of the most racist movie roles ever put on screen appeared, Mickey Rooney's Mr. Yunioshi. With his pulled back eyelids, buck teeth, and thick accent, this was the equivalent of wearing blackface in its horrible depiction of another race. While the white movegoers laughed, Bruce Lee sat cold silent. His girlfriend was laughing too until she looked over at him and realized how terrible this Mr. Yunioshi made somebody feel about themselves. That's the first time I can remember understanding racism in popular media.

Now with Asian American blogs documenting racism all over the place, I feel like I'm always on the lookout for racism. Is it better that we are now more sensitive about hurting the sensibilities of other races? Yes. Does it make my life better knowing that racism is all around us and otherwise intelligent people still make racist acts, whether intentional or not? No. I just get inflamed over something that sometimes maybe I should just forget instead of allowing it to mentally fester in my head for hours or days afterwards. Can't somebody write happy Asian blogs?

Yellow Peril In Olympic Uniforms

I'm not sure what to make of the current controversy over the U.S. Olympic uniforms. When it was discovered that the uniforms were made in China, even though they were designed by American Ralph Lauren, the political class went into a frenzy. Trying to emphasize their patriotic credentials during an election year, some members have Congress have even called for burning the uniforms instead of allowing our players to wear them in London.

While I too wished that the uniforms were manufactured in America, I can't help feeling there is more than a bit of xenophobia and racism in this debate. This is an increasingly global economy. We wear clothes made in Vietnam and drive cars from Mexico. Our wine comes from Italy and our fruit ships from Argentina. Would the politicians be in such a furious state if the uniforms were designed by Armani and made in Italy? I don't think so. But as Americans increasingly see themselves as being on the decline and China on the ascendency, these racist attitudes are bound to become more common.

The Olympics is supposed to be a world stage where the entire planet comes to compete in a peaceful and friendly atmosphere. Let's not mar the occasion with these racist feelings.