Earlier this year, I released my first book, A Practical Guide to Racism, a satire of race and racism written in character as blowhard ethnography professor C.H. Dalton. Below is an excerpt from Chapter Six: Asians.
Despite the best efforts of the United States Congress and the admissions boards of our top universities, Orientals are everywhere -- some seventy billion in Asia alone. They come in all shapes and sizes, from sumo wrestlers to karate men, and they have found their way into all aspects of our culture, from video games to action movies.
In the United States, the Asian Invasion started less than 200 years ago. Toward the end of the 1800s, America's growing prosperity was drawing more and more immigrants from Asia, especially workers from China. Many of these Chinese men, or "Chinamen," were employed as manual laborers on the country's rapidly expanding rail lines, and were an integral part of the effort to build the first transcontinental railroad. In fact, many engineers still use the measurement system that originated during that period, in which a mile is equivalent to roughly 1,760 dead Chinamen.
But with this growing population of increasingly prosperous immigrants came the fear that Asians were taking jobs from Americans -- the so-called "yellow peril." The yellow peril was just as real to Americans at that time as the preceding "red peril," the later "brown peril," and the more recent "purple peril," the much-feared defensive line of the 1974 Minnesota Vikings.
Noted author H. P. Lovecraft was especially afraid of the growing Asian influence, and some of his lesser-known works reflect this preoccupation. "Li Po: Reanimator," "The Doom That Came From Peking," and "Cthulhu and the Ching Chong Chinabots" are just a few of his more xenophobic stories. They tell of a mysterious, bucktoothed race of ancient Gods who urinate in other people's cola.
These fears had little basis in fact, but if there's one thing Americans hate, it's other people doing the degrading, labor-intensive jobs that they won't do themselves.*
Widespread outrage over the immigrants' creepy animation and brazen lack of epicanthic folds compelled Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred all further immigration from China.** A mere sixty-one years later, this extreme measure was overturned by the more reasonable Magnuson Act of 1943, which allowed 105 whole Chinese people to enter the country every year.
But, just like Harvard's admissions guidelines, the Chinese Exclusion Act was unable to stem the tide. When their best efforts to keep Asians out of the country failed, the U.S. government took the next rational step and decided to lock them all up in camps. In these internment camps, the detainees, or "interns," would serve their time by making photocopies, doing some light filing, and fetching coffee from the Starbucks downstairs.
Relations are better now, and the Asians even have their own towns: low-income, high-density areas where white people go for massages and counterfeit purses. Chinatowns, Koreatowns, Japantowns, and Cambodiavilles exist in nearly every major city today. But don't worry, the locals are now free to come and go as they please.
One of the reasons that Asians are so tolerated these days is that white men really like to have sex with them. Many Americans travel all the way to Asia just for that purpose; it's a process known as "sex tourism," and it makes up more than 90 percent of the annual GDP in most Asian countries. (The other 10 percent is mostly Kumite-related.)
Not all white men who date Asians have an Asian fetish, though. Some white men like Asians in the same way that overweight white women like black men; it's just nice to be good enough for someone. Many white men also enjoy dating small, boyish foreign women whom they can dominate, physically and emotionally, rather than face the risks of an adult relationship with a peer.
So who is the mysterious Asian? Is he megalomaniacal facial-hair enthusiast Fu
Manchu? Or is he merely 1950s Atlas Comics Fu Manchu knockoff, The Yellow Claw? Or even another mustachioed villain altogether?
In this country, the Asian is actually relatively harmless, and makes an excellent research assistant or adoptee. I believe that the widespread hatred and mistrust of our mysterious neighbors to the east*** comes more from ignorance than actual distaste. In the material following, I will alleviate that ignorance with a helpful, country-by-country breakdown of the mysterious Asian, so that our hatred of this race can be based on facts, rather than conjecture.
*This attitude, and the racial violence it often inspires, led to the near extermination of our entire native Oompa Loompa population in the early 1900s.
**The President at the time was the portly Chester A. Arthur, who, ironically, had more chins than Chinatown.
***Or west, depending which way you go around.
From A Practical Guide to Racism by C.H. Dalton. Reprinted by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of the Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Sam Means 2008.