Opinion: Why I can't shrug off KDWB's hateful slur against Hmong community

Bee Vang

04/07/2011
By Bee Van
TwinCities.com

Last week a chilling thing happened. I started hearing funny noises. Noises that were almost incomprehensible. But the eerie thing was, I was sure I'd heard them before ...

Here's what they sounded like: "Lighten up." "Quit being so dang sensitive." "Can't you take a joke?"

As a Hmong actor who portrayed Thao Vang Lor in Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino," something echoed in me this spring as I listened to the uproar about an impromptu song on the radio station KDWB. During the shooting of the film, I tried to stay true to the script. But as a Hmong person, I also tried to do justice to my own life and to that of others like me.

"Gran Torino," as many know, is the story of an aging Detroit white man who gets involved with a neighboring Hmong family and attempts to intervene in their lives and prevent the teenage boy Thao from getting drawn into a gang. During casting, when I first saw excerpts from Gran Torino, I was puzzled because so many things in it seemed distorted and unrecognizable. One of the lines jumped out at me. In the scene when Thao was getting to know his white neighbor, Walt, the old man had been insulting him with a litany of racial slurs: "chink," "gook," "swamp rat." My character blurted out this reply: "You can call me whatever you want, because you know what? I'll take it."

"I'll take it"? Who says that?

And yet, as the KDWB gang seems to think, this is exactly what Hmong in the Twin Cities should say because, after all, the Hmong are spineless "swamp rats" and won't stand up to the bully pulpit that a radio station is. The equivalent of the "n" word for the Hmong can be put into a song and played on the radio, and we'll just take it. KDWB's defense, in a halfhearted "apology," is that it was just a joke and not intended to hurt.

This is rationalized by the fact that not all Hmong found the song to be offensive; some, moreover, found it hilarious. The Pioneer Press report pointed to KDWB's Facebook page, where the station claimed that everything's fine because "One woman said she is Hmong and thought it was funny..."

In a similar way, after Gran Torino's release, Hmong around the country were furious about its negative stereotypes and cultural distortions. I know this acutely because when I spoke at public events, they came out to confront me. I found myself in the awkward position of explaining my obligation as an actor while also recognizing that, as a Hmong American, I didn't feel I could own the lines I was uttering. I also told them that although many of us on the set had objected to aspects of the script, the producers preferred whichever Hmong "cultural consultant" had the most amenable take on the matter and would lend credence to whatever Hollywood stereotypes the film wanted to convey. I reminded my critics that this was a white production, that our presence as actors did not amount to control of our images.

To be fair, a handful of Hmong at those public forums defended Gran Torino and said they enjoyed the film, just as some did KDWB's song. What's startling about this variety of opinions is not the bare fact that they exist, of course. What troubles me is that, after a Hmong person tells me how she or he enjoyed the film (or the song), there routinely comes the remark that, yes, I know some Hmong who are exactly like those bad Hmong in the movie, or who live in overcrowded houses and get pregnant at age 16. But — and there's always a "but" even if it's just implied — "I'm not like that even though I'm Hmong. And that's why I can laugh at them..."

Those of us who discipline ourselves properly can in turn be made into armor by a society determined to defend colorblindness every time a race skirmish breaks out. But no matter how many Hmong human shields KDWB hoists upon their battlements, the fact remains that "Thirty Hmongs in a House" was racist and harmful. It was aimed at a minority community from which the white creators felt no threat, and hence could condescend to with impunity. Yes, we all have freedom of speech, but some have more than others. If we Hmong avail ourselves of it, we might just be laying the groundwork for more backlash.

All of which harshly reminds us of the Hmong's tenuous status in the Twin Cities and beyond as always outsiders like so many Asian Americans — a status made explicit in 1998 when KQRS aired a white man's rant that asked Hmong to "go back to the caves of Laos" and "assimilate or hit the goddamn road." And speaking of backlash, our ascribed foreignness also forever reminds us of Vincent Chin, the Detroit Chinese American who took the mortal fall for the faltering American economy because he was mistaken for Japanese, associated with Japanese imports, and bludgeoned to death by two white men.

Hmong Americans are tacitly told that some of us are becoming good minorities. The good ones behave: they laugh things off, they are "post-race," they are sure that no other Americans intend to harm us ... They even join in condemning those of us who are less fortunate, or more - well - Hmong. They, in fact, are becoming "model minorities"!

Maybe, they think, if we Hmong point our fingers hard enough at ourselves and laugh hard enough at ourselves, we will go right through our skin and come out the other side as clean, respectable middle-class Americans.

But in my humble perspective — from the poor Minneapolis neighborhood where I grew up to Brown University where I am a student now — what I would want to see happen is that more listeners could hear clearly the racial hatred and revilement of poverty in that song.

After reading all the Internet quips, I toss and turn at night. Shrug it off? I wish that, for just a moment, I could stop hearing those disciplining noises. Like nightmares twisting the cold daylight reality of ongoing racism, they make it impossible for me to sleep ...

Bee Vang played the lead role of Thao Vang Lor in the Hollywood movie "Gran Torino." Formerly of Twin Cities, he is now a first-year student at Brown University in Providence, RI. He's on Facebook.