I really liked The Black Kung Fu Experience. It really made me think about the intercultural transmission that happens in the United States that you rarely see in other nations.

I also found it interesting that Shaolin Ulysses made such a strong link between Shaolin kung fu and Buddhism. I was not aware of that at all.

I had a real fun time with “The Wedding Banquet.” I loved the interplay between various cultural traditions, and the push and pull of acculturating to the United States versus being a good Chinese child and honoring your parents.

I’m not going to lie – I think that Shilpa Davé is a little full of it in her article, “Apu’s Brown Voice.” She expects way too much out of both a fictional character and ignores the realities of Indian emigration to the United States.

Davé argues that Apu’s accent – his ‘brown voice’ – is used to set him apart, to identify his outsider nature to Springfield. Well, duh. The character is defined as growing up in India, having moved to the United States as an adult. She also lays out clearly how Indian English is a different variant of English, similar to Australian English or British English. It’s natural that the character would speak the language of his birth country, Indian English, so I don’t know how that could be offensive.

Technically, I would concede that Apu’s character overshadows the diversity that encompasses Indian Americans and the Indian diaspora. That’s almost on par with saying John Wayne doesn’t represent the diversity of America or James Bond doesn’t represent the diversity of the United Kingdom. It’s also an impossible task. Let us remember that India today has a population of 1 billion citizens, with such a linguistic diversity that 22 languages have a legal status in the country. I think that it’s next to impossible to represent such a diversity through one character.

Davé makes a point to mention the political diversity of India and Pakistan in order to judge Apu’s accent:

[Azaria] learned his accent “from listening. In Los Angeles, going to 7-11s, hearing Indian and Pakistani clerks.” Interestingly, as Al Jean’s quotation shows, even the writers… cannot distinguish between India (a democracy that has a largely Hindu population) and Pakistan (a military-based government that is primarily Muslim).

She doesn’t, however, mention the linguistic commonalities that they share. Linguists, for example, would argue that India and Pakistan share a language in common with two different standards. Both derived from the same root language, Hindi is spoken in India, written with a Sanskrit-derived script, using Sanskrit roots to coin new words, while Urdu is spoken in Pakistan, written with a modified Arabic script, using Arabic and Persian to coin new words. It’s entirely possible, then, for Apu to have the same accent whether he be from India or Pakistan. (Davé also forgets to mention in this section, regardless of the slip up that a writer may have made in an interview, that Apu is clearly a Hindu, thus from India, as shown by the statue of Ganesha, a Hindu god.)

Davé laments the popular perception of Indians as well educated (329). What she leaves out is that Indian Americans, the class that most Americans are likely to encounter in their everyday life, are well educated. About 40% of Indian Americans have a post-graduate degree – a marvelous, and unique feat considering only 20% of Indians have graduated high school. Why is there the disparity? Money. It would take the average Indian one year’s salary, approximately USD 1000, to afford a one-way plane ticket from India to the United States. This means that modern (post-1965) Indian immigrants are self-selected in a manner based on who can afford to emigrate, and who cannot. In other words, as Indian American author Sukethu Mehta writes, “If India shared a border with the U.S. and it were possible for its poorest residents to cross over on foot, we would fast cease to be the model minority, and talk-show hosts would rail against us just as they do against Mexicans.”

So in other words, you can’t just leave out facts that aren’t supportive of your argument, Ms. Davé.

I really liked this movie. It was very lighthearted, the characters were entirely believable, nobody was a caricature, all the reactions were very realistic. There were no stereotypes of people in the movie. I liked how the characters had honest struggles with their issues.

I found that the two movies on the various stereotypes in movies were both very informative. I thought that “Slanted Screen” was a little bit more balanced because it sought to find both positive portrayals of Asians in movies as well as negative ones, whereas I found “Dragon Lady” to be more one-sided in that aspect.