Feature Story from THIS Magazine - Volume 36 • Number 4 January/February 2003

I chink, therefore I am

by Kate Rigg

When Wolfgang Arneheim called me a chink in grade three, I punched him. My mother always told me that if anyone called me a name I should “punch them in the nose.” My mom is what’s known as an Indo-thug from a proud line of Bataks who, legend has it, would eat their enemies in war. So you know, nose-punching was a lot tamer than a lot of things she could have suggested.

The kid got a bloody nose and I went home and asked my parents, “what’s a chink?” They told me it was a mean name for a Chinese person, and I spent the next 15 years going: “But I’m not even Chinese. I’m not even part Chinese…”

What I came to understand later is that even though I wasn’t Chinese, I was a chink. Since one of the main tenets of racist spew against Asian people is that we all look, act and are the same, it’s hardly surprising that the word has been hurled at Japanese people, Thai people, Vietnamese people, Malaysians and even half-Indonesians. Insert stereotype here. Now classify under the title card chink.

Despite the nose-punching incident, these days, I say chink a lot. I also say gook, nip, jap, me so horny, me love you long time, and a myriad of other questionable pop culture refractions of my Asian identity. I’m a comedian and satirist by trade. I try to incite discussion and provoke change by drawing attention to societal ills, as I perceive them.

I get off on watching people’s faces go from shock to amusement to understanding as I methodically debunk the myths surrounding Asians, drop kicking all the pidgin-speaking, G.I.-loving, manicuring, kung-fu-kicking, flower-arranging, ping-pong-shooting, violin-playing, math-equation-solving, laundry-taking, opium-smoking, delicate-oriental-lotus-flower Suzie Wongs and Charlie Chans that exist in the media’s takeaway mind.

Some people argue that reclaiming bigoted language just continues the negative vibe. If the word is still in use, it won’t simply die out naturally as we aspire to a better world where we are not separated by our identities. It’s also sometimes argued that assuming power by colonizing slurs is a sham, because the impulse to own a hurtful word comes out of a deep sense of self-hatred and shame. Or that, by distancing yourself from the word, you’re denying your cultural identity. Like, if I make a comment about ping-pong-ball-shooting Asian women in movies, clearly I am not one—and have the ability to laugh at the stereotype without being hurt by it. You could also argue that using these stereotypes as a defence mechanism only gives the word more power.

Others believe that ripping the word out of the bigot’s mouth and placing it safely and lovingly in the mouths of the targeted community is empowering. Look at gay culture’s embrace of fag and dyke as terms to designate their own. Reclaiming a word can also give it new meaning, as in hip hop’s adoption of the word nigger, as in “he’s my nigga,” to mean cohort or brother in spirit. The ironic and deliberate use by one of its traditional targets can also indicate the speaker’s strength and distance from the slur.

Individuals have a choice; groups have a choice in how to combat the racist epithet. On both sides of the argument are compelling emotional incentives. It is a powerful thing to coin terms like “Indonesian-Canadian,” or “African-American” and introduce them into mass consciousness. But it’s also a powerful thing to high-five another Asian person and say, hey, whassup chink? and belligerently defy the power of a bigoted speaker. By ridiculing slurs, I’m trying to remove one more linguistic roadblock between the bigots and the human beings they have labelled and dismissed.

People always ask me if I get a lot of criticism from the Asian community. The answer is no. I have received five letters to date arguing with my position on the colonization of racist language. I have been called self-hating once. I also get a ton of fan mail and encouragement from people who are still searching for their identity as modern North Amerasians, and are tired of being told lies by the media.

But even when someone can’t get past my use of chink to my context, I feel gratified that one more person will go home and say, “Hey this totally misguided dilettante made me so mad when she said chink.” And suddenly two more people will examine their position toward racism.

If words were just black ink on paper, you could ball ’em up and throw ’em away like a day-old newspaper. We could launch massive language-cleanup campaigns and just move on to the next headline. But words have histories, and emotional residue, and when someone calls you a chink it has an army of evil intent behind it, trained in the ignorance and xenophobia of generations of misunderstanding.

I personally support any action that hastens the expiration date of both the impact of racial slurs, and the slurs themselves. But if we pretend that chink will just go away if we ignore it—like a questionable mole or the irs—we allow it to fester. We allow it to go on being whispered at Klan meetings and held as truth by guys who jerk off to images of happy hookers in war movies. So I say: wake the slurring giant from his complacent, dominant-culture slumber and scream chink like you just don’t care. Until we’re forced to re-evaluate our position towards all racist language, we won’t be able to put it into the dead file and begin to deal with the people who were once obscured by those words.

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