Asian Jeff Quotes

If you go to an “Asian American and Pacific Islander” event, you’re not going to see Samoans, you’re not going to see Tongans, you’re not going to see Māori. We’re half of the acronym, but not even close to half the representation. The Indigenous story is always washed away by the immigrant story. Americans are proud to say that “we’re a nation of immigrants,” but that’s also saying “f*ck the Indigenous people.” We’re proud to be mixed in Hawaii, but we need to acknowledge that that comes at the price of Indigenous people. We can support each other, but there’s a difference between inclusion and erasure.

After considering making the Mandarin, a mustache-twirling Asian villain from the comics, Iron Man’s first foe, the new studio instead decided on Obadiah Stain, played by Jeff Bridges. He was less fantastical, had a more personal connection to Downey’s character, “and saved us $10 to $20 million we would have had to spend going to China,” noted Maisel. The first twenty minutes of the movie take place in a cave, and there are surprisingly few scenes of Iron Man flying or doing battle in his combat armor, which kept the budget down. Nonetheless, Perlmutter kept as close an eye on the script as he did on office supplies. When a convoy attack at the beginning of the movie was supposed to include ten Humvees, the frugal executive said, “No, too many, too expensive, we can do it with three.” Another scene, in which Iron Man saves villagers from a group of terrorists, was going to cost $1 million, and Perlmutter wouldn’t authorize the money until the last minute, figuring it could be trashed if costs rose elsewhere. All of this backseat driving by Perlmutter, who became Marvel’s CEO in 2005, drove Arad insane.

While hate crimes in general decreased by 7 percent in 2020, targeted attacks on Asians increased by over 150 percent over the same period.

The project was already in development before I joined the division. I was at Touchstone Pictures in live action, and I had heard that they were doing Mulan, it was picking up heat, and they were interested in moving it beyond development. That was actually the reason why I went over to Disney Feature Animation. I was like, if they’re going to make Mulan, I have to be a part of it, because this isn’t going to happen again for 20 more years. And in fact, the next time there was a Chinese family in a global animated film, it was Abominable, 21 years later.

Yellowface enables racist caricature—but it also denies Asian actors the opportunity to play Asian roles.

American culture tends to see Asians as weak and in need of white people to come save us. That’s especially true in pop culture about the Vietnam War. The narrative is all about what Americans went through, using Vietnamese people and the setting of Vietnam as props and backdrop. There’s no concern over the interiority of the people who live there. Miss Saigon is the largest manifestation of this. It says, “You’re never going to be the hero. We cannot relate to you. You’re always going to just be the sidekick in our stories or a trigger for our feelings.

It was easy to see how his killings could be misconstrued. The death tally was three Caucasian, two Latino, one Asian, one Native American, and ten African American men. He had proven to be a multicultural killer8. Murphy recorded his answer and asked, “Yeah, Jeff, but how did you decide which ones you were going to kill and which ones you would just have sex with?” Dahmer said that his decision to kill was based on a variety of factors. “Usually I knew when I went out if I was looking to keep someone. Before leaving the apartment, I crushed five to seven Halcion tablets in a glass and left it on the kitchen sink.

The writer Jeff Chang writes that “I want to love us” but he says that he can’t bring himself to do that because he doesn’t know who “us” is. I share that uncertainty. Who is us? What is us? Is there even such a concept as an Asian American consciousness?

What the article didn’t acknowledge was that many East and South Asian Americans going through high school and college in the 1980s were children of the first wave of Asians to come to the U.S. after 1965, a disproportionate number of whom were hyper-educated superachievers themselves, because of the Hart-Celler Act’s preferences for immigrants capable of contributing to the scientific, medical, and engineering professions. (And meanwhile, the experiences of children of Asian immigrants who arrived through other channels, for example as refugees of war, did not match the stereotype.)

IN 1987, TIME published a cover story, titled “Those Asian-American Whiz Kids,” that stands as one of the earliest pop-culture eruptions of a new Asian stereotype: the Asian American (specifically, the East/ South Asian American) as academic overachiever.

Some defenders of Chua, however, did point out that humming beneath the rage at Chua was a xenophobic fear of Chinese hegemony, as could be seen in some of the more patently racist reactions to the Wall Street Journal’s “extract” of the book, headlined “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” Despite the controversy—or because of it—the book sold like New Year’s rice cakes.

It’s safe to say that South Korea now has a reputation for being a place where cool stuff comes from. And yet, just 70 years ago—after the end of the Korean War—Korea was one of the poorest nations in the world.

South Korea’s government and private industry have spent the last quarter-century collaborating to build this pop culture empire, in pursuit of a soft-power strategy that they’ve dubbed “Hallyu,” or the “Korean Wave.

And contrary to the stereotype of quiet Asians, I could see that we like to fight. That we were in a fight to tell our own stories, to decide which images and narratives defined us. Decades of racist imagery, from Hollywood movies to political propaganda, informed by racism, colonialism, and conquest, have seeped their way into the consciousness of what the West views as “Asian.

In the spring of 2002, popular clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch decided to, as they say, fuck around and find out. The company’s latest round of overpriced clothing included an assortment of Asian-themed novelty graphic T-shirts advertising fictional businesses. One of the designs, the one most people seem to remember, was for “Wong Brothers Laundry Service,” evoking stereotypically cheap Chinatown labor, bachelor societies, and Ancient Chinese Secrets.

Vince is the Asian fellow?” Brian asked, and I nodded. “Yes, you had mentioned him before.” He drove us up the ramp and onto the Palmetto Expressway, headed east.

The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics giants viewed Internet sellers like Amazon as sketchy discounters. They also had big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City whispering in their ears and asking them to take a pass on Amazon. There were middlemen distributors, like Ingram Electronics, but they offered a limited selection. Bezos deployed Doerr to talk to Howard Stringer at Sony America, but he got nowhere. So Payne had to turn to the secondary distributors—jobbers that exist in an unsanctioned, though not illegal, gray market. Randy Miller, a retail finance director who came to Amazon from Eddie Bauer, equates it to buying from the trunk of someone’s car in a dark alley. “It was not a sustainable inventory model, but if you are desperate to have particular products on your site or in your store, you do what you need to do,” he says. Buying through these murky middlemen got Payne and his fledgling electronics team part of the way toward stocking Amazon’s virtual shelves. But Bezos was unimpressed with the selection and grumpily compared it to shopping in a Russian supermarket during the years of Communist rule. It would take Amazon years to generate enough sales to sway the big Asian brands. For now, the electronics store was sparely furnished. Bezos had asked to see $100 million in electronics sales for the 1999 holiday season; Payne and his crew got about two-thirds of the way there. Amazon officially announced the new toy and electronics stores that summer, and in September, the company held a press event at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan to promote the new categories. Someone had the idea that the tables in the conference room at the Sheraton should have piles of merchandise representing all the new categories, to reinforce the idea of broad selection. Bezos loved it, but when he walked into the room the night before the event, he threw a tantrum: he didn’t think the piles were large enough. “Do you want to hand this business to our competitors?” he barked into his cell phone at his underlings. “This is pathetic!” Harrison Miller, Chris Payne, and their colleagues fanned out that night across Manhattan to various stores, splurging on random products and stuffing them in the trunks of taxicabs. Miller spent a thousand dollars alone at a Toys “R” Us in Herald Square. Payne maxed out his personal credit card and had to call his wife in Seattle to tell her not to use the card for a few days. The piles of products were eventually large enough to satisfy Bezos, but the episode was an early warning. To satisfy customers and their own demanding boss during the upcoming holiday, Amazon executives were going to have to substitute artifice and improvisation for truly comprehensive selection.

Talvin Singh, Thievery Corporation, A.R. Rahman, AmarBaaba Maal, Asian Dub Foundation, Autechre, Badmarsh and Sri, Bjork, Black Star Liner, The Blue Nile, Boards of Canada, The Chemical Brothers, Dead Can Dance, The Fake Portishead, Future Sound of London, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Goldfrapp, Jamyang, Joi, Jeff Buckley, Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham: original movie soundtrack, Nitin Sawhney, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Rakesh Chaurasia, Sigur Rós, State of Bengal.

That summer, Harrison Miller and Bezos butted heads in front of the board of directors over the size of the bet on toys. Bezos wanted Miller to plow $120 million into stocking every possible toy, from Barbie dolls to rare German-made wooden trains to cheap plastic beach pails, so that kids and parents would never be disappointed when they searched for an item on Amazon. But a prescient Miller, sensing disaster ahead, pushed to lower his own buy. “No! No! A hundred and twenty million!” Bezos yelled. “I want it all. If I have to, I will drive it to the landfill myself!” “Jeff, you drive a Honda Accord,” Joy Covey pointed out. “That’s going to be a lot of trips.” Bezos prevailed. And the company would make a sizable contribution to Toys for Tots after the holidays that year. “That first holiday season was the best of times and the worst of times,” Miller says. “The store was great for customers and we made our revenue goals, which were big, but other than that everything that could go wrong did. In the aftermath we were sitting on fifty million dollars of toy inventory. I had guys going down the back stairs with ‘Vinnie’ in New York, selling Digimons off to Mexico at twenty cents on the dollar. You just had to get rid of them, fast.” The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics

THIS PART OF THE HOSPITAL SEEMS LIKE FOREIGN COUNTRY to me. There is no sense of the battlefield here, no surgical teams in gore-stained scrubs trading witty remarks about missing body parts, no steely-eyed administrators with their clipboards, no herds of old drunks in wheelchairs, and above all, no flocks of wide-eyed sheep huddled together in fear at what might come out of the double steel doors. There is no stench of blood, antiseptic, and terror; the smells here are kinder, homier. Even the colors are different: softer, more pastel, without the drab, battleship utilitarianism of the walls in other parts of the building. There are, in fact, none of the sights and sounds and dreadful smells I have come to associate with hospitals, none at all. There is only the crowd of moon-eyed men standing at the big window, and to my infinite surprise, I am one of them. We stand together, happily pressed up to the glass and cheerfully making space for any newcomer. White, black, brown; Latin, African-American, Asian-American, Creole—it doesn’t matter. We are all brothers. No one sneers or frowns; no one seems to care about getting an accidental nudge in the ribs now and again, and no one, wonder of all, seems to harbor any violent thoughts about any of the others. Not even me. Instead, we all cluster at the glass, looking at the miraculous commonplace in the next room. Are these human beings? Can this really be the Miami I have always lived in? Or has some strange physics experiment in an underground supercollider sent us all to live in Bizarro World, where everyone is kind and tolerant and happy all the time? Where

—Finally, he spotted an Asian carp coming their way. The carp wasn’t as big as the elephantine tilapia he had once wrestled, but Lisa was young, and Jeff figured that vanquishing a midsize carp would be enough for someone her age. Jeff hugged his baby girl, gave her a big kiss, and threw her off the rock, right in the path of the bottom feeder. The moral of the story is— —Wait! Wait! What happened? What happened to Lisa? —The carp ate her, of course. She was just a baby! You didn’t really think she was gonna make it, did you? —I…Yes, I did…