Anyways, back to the reading, I am not surprised that I learned more disturbing things about American history that I did not know about before. When I went to Alcatraz, I wondered how long American school systems will keep up this act of “Thanksgiving” and how the Indians/Natives and pilgrims got along and had a wonderful feast together. I enjoy this book in a way that it is challenging the American tradition of covering up the dark things of American history.

Reading the oppression that goes on reminds me of Wedding Banquet and East Main Street “Apu’s voice.” The power of deceit. When we are children we are fed this idea of harmony and peace among each race and we are blinded by it that school systems sweep true history under the rug; at least, up until high school we learn that history was never really taught until that moment. In Wedding Banquet Wei Tung feeds his parents this absolute fake identity of a straight, successful, soon-to-be married man. While his parents just accept it because it’s what they want to hear and they never knew about him (at least his father did at some point). The makers of Simpson’s know that the voice of Apu is nowhere to being Indian, but still sells it to the audience, knowing it is not a true Indian. 

Apu began working at the Kwik-E-Mart during graduate school to pay off his student loan, but he stayed afterward as he had come to enjoy his job and the friends he had made. He remained an illegal immigrant until Mayor Quimby proposed a municipal law to expel all undocumented aliens. Apu responded by purchasing a forged birth certificate from the Springfield Mafia that listed his parents as US citizens Herb and Judy Nahasapeemapetilon, but when he realized he was forsaking his origins, he abandoned this plan and instead successfully managed to pass his citizenship test with help from Lisa and Homer Simpson.” (Wikipedia)

Apu is an Indian character in the hit tv series The Simpsons. He’s funny and portrays a “vehicle to introduce current views and debates about minorities in the United States” (323). Though he is one of the few Indian representations on television in today’s society, who Apu is is not who he seems to be. The person who voices Apu is not Indian, nor is he Asian. Hank Azaria actually voices Apu. There had been dilemmas in the past where white actors would portray Asian ones even though there were Asian actors in the field. Why have someone who is not a certain race be a certain race? I understand that he is just acting, yet that gives privilege to other white actors to mimic and and give that one accent to that certain race. “The satire of ethnic assimilation illustrates how racial and ethnic identities operate beyond the visual and are influenced by the reception of accented speech” (315). What is happening is an accent is giving the audience an image (more than likely a racial image) of someone and then an assumption of some racial culture and binding it. For instance, if on the radio, there was a woman talking with an Asian accent, most people would picture an Asian, most likely Chinese, woman talking with having this certain Asian culture that she lives by.

We also watched a film, The Wedding Banquet, and the movie was about a gay Chinese man who marries a woman just to please his parents. When his parents decide to visit to help with the banquet, both Wei Wei and Wei Tung practically renovate the apartment. Instead of having all the modern art pieces around the apartment, they took all of it down and replaced it with traditional Chinese items. In the movie, Wei Tung has a typical Chinese accent, but he does not live the traditional Chinese culture. This movie sort of breaks that bond between sound and appearance.

Overall, I think both the book and movie show the power of deceit. The way someone talks with an accent can lead to an assumption on how that person looks and the way they live. The movie challenges it by Wei Tung covering his real living environment with “fake” Chinese living styles and Apu, in real life, not being Asian or any form of Asian at all.