I wrote this paper for a college class where the teacher hated me and I got a D on it.
The Shænghai Kid: from Chinese to Chinese American (2017)
Shanghai Noon is an American-Hong Kong action movie that blends Chinese and American genres and culture, mixing kung fu action scenes and Chinese characters into a plot and setting more typical of a Western. Of three main characters, one is a white man who is more or less a typical star in a Western, and the other two are a Chinese man and a Chinese woman. The movie witnesses a transformation of a Chinese Imperial Guard into a cowboy, and all the cultural and sociolinguistic implications of such a transformation. Though the protagonist of the film (Chon Wang) speaks English from the beginning of the film, he changes from a Chinese outsider who happens to speak English, to an integrated Chinese American, exhibiting in his dialect features of “yellow English” (Huebner and Uyechi), Hong Kong English (given that Jackie Chan is actually from Hong Kong), and Asian American English. This happens mostly through the influence of Roy O’Bannon, Chon’s adversary-turned-partner. On an Eastern-Western cultural spectrum, Chon and O’Bannon begin the film existing at opposite ends of it, and Chon moves towards the Western end of the spectrum as he assimilates into a Western society.
The plot, character development, humor, and even action sequences in Shanghai Noon are nearly all primarily racially driven, showing conflicts and collusions between the three major generalized ethnic groups that appear in the movie: Caucasian (White), Chinese (Asian), and Native American, though the axis around which the film revolves is the clash between Chinese and White characters. This ethnic/racial conflict is, much like the film itself, often in humorous jest and often a representation of true hatred and racism. The conflict manifests semiotically in linguistic fashion and otherwise, especially due to the amount that Jackie Chan’s Chinese accent stands out when his character is in America surrounded by Americans who view him as a total outsider.
The film begins in Mandarin Chinese in the Forbidden City in China in 1881. The first instance of English occurs with Princess Pei-Pei speaking to a Caucasian confidant, and in this scene Jackie Chan’s character speaks Chinese to her. The surrounding sequences are all in Chinese and depict Chon Wang as an archetypal Chinese character with no typical American characteristics. In his first encounter with Caucasian enemies, he and his uncle with whom he is traveling both experience extreme racism, to the point where his uncle is shot on sight. Pei-Pei’s confidant turns out to be colluding with a Chinese criminal and she is kidnapped and taken to a rail yard where Chinese slaves under him are working on the railroad. The film takes place, probably purposefully, in 1881, the year before the Chinese Exclusion Act was implemented in the United States. The exploitation of Chinese immigrants for work, including Princess Pei-Pei, is also a central theme in the movie, and could not have been as much so had it been set after the Exclusion Act. This places the main Chinese characters of the film under extreme duress when placed in their new American environment.
Although Wang and Pei-Pei both speak English, their communicative competence is both lower and perceived as lower when surrounded by native English speakers. They speak with heavy Chinese accents and are judged heavily for it, as ““negative images of “yellow English” plague Asian immigrants as they suffer various degrees of language-based discrimination” (Huebner and Uyechi). The clash between Chinese culture and Western culture, particularly that of White Nevada, becomes the central theme around which the film revolves. Chon’s journey with Roy O’Bannon involves his necessary assimilation into Western culture as they live the life of cowboys together. Pei-Pei’s assimilation is rather different, as she is kidnapped by a Chinese gangster and forced to work in a camp populated by other Chinese workers. For an unexplained reason, all these workers and the gangster who is enslaving them speak English to each other, and do so in stereotypical “yellow” English. She remains in America at the end of the film but has not yet been adapted to an American lifestyle outside of the context of the labor camp.
As the film ends with Chon staying in America, he undergoes a transition from being just an Asian outsider to being a true Asian American, culturally, and linguistically. This is seen in many steps such as his adoption of a cowboy wardrobe and forced use of cowboy language (notably “Howdy pardner”, which he is told to say as to not rouse suspicion, and says so in a very thick Chinese accent that fools nobody). Despite being understandable, his attempt to use idioms and expressions that do not directly translate to Chinese hinders his ability to speak to those around him, who essentially view him as an alien. His use of cowboy language is a feeble attempt at imitation at best.
Chon is not used to this style of communication, and it is not only his difficulty in speaking the English language, but his being accustomed to Chinese strategies of discourse; “Often discourse strategies effective in Chinese are transferred to interactions when the speaker is using English, and those strategies are likely to be interpreted as behavioral differences, which are subject to misperceptions, misinterpretations, and misunderstandings. Over time such miscues can lead to stereotypes that are reinforced with every such interaction” (Huebner and Uyechi). This does not manifest only in his speech; throughout the film Chon consistently misinterprets American idioms and gestures, most notably Roy’s gesture of spitting on his own hand before shaking Chon’s, which he responds to by also spitting on Roy’s hand. Roy is both disappointed and amused by Chon’s inability to quickly assimilate, and occasionally acts in a discriminatory manner towards him, even calling him a “Chinaman”. The other White characters in the film discriminate against Chon even more, often to the point of dehumanizing him due to his ethnicity. Chon believes he can negotiate with people using discourse strategies that work in China, notably when he attempts to negotiate with the sheriff who is trying to kill Roy, and is met with hostility and gunfire. Similar situations occur throughout the entire film, as he attempts on numerous occasions to apply his Chinese communicative skills, but it becomes clear that just because he is able to speak English and has a good vocabulary, it does not mean that he is able to communicate with American people and be perceived as having the same level of communicative competence as them.
It is worth noting that “Asian Americans, whether native English speaking or not, face... the challenge of reconciling the differences between heritage and mainstream American discourse styles and registers” (Huebner and Uyechi). The film is not simply about a clash between the culture of the “East” and the “West”; in choosing an Imperial Guard and a cowboy outlaw as the two main characters, the film selects cartoonish and exaggerated representations of Chinese and American culture, greatly amplifying the significance of heritage and discourse. The very concept of the film blends the genre of the Western with the Hong Kong kung fu film such that the cultural clash manifests not only linguistically but in concept and action as well.
Chon receives the name “Shanghai Kid” after he is branded an outlaw and wanted posters of him are put up all over Carson City. He remarks on how he is not from Shanghai, pronouncing it ʃɑŋhɑi, while every Western character in the film pronounces it ʃhæŋhɑi. This is similar to Roy and other American character’s pronounciation of Chon’s name, which sounds more like “zhang wen” or “jiang wen” coming from his own mouth, as the standard English name “John”. These differences in pronunciation, as well as the use of “Shanghai” itself, is significant in how the other characters in the film view Chon, simply as a “chinaman”, while knowing nothing about his country of origin or his background, which has nothing to do with Shanghai at all. The title of the film is also a commentary on this; it is a Hong Kong film starring a character from Beijing and “Shanghai” is used as a blanket term for China, suggesting how Chinese culture is simplified in Western society.
Especially given the appearance of Native American and African American characters in the film, Chon’s transformation cannot be simply to one of an American when the character who is influencing his change is specifically a White American; the Native American and African American characters in the movie have little to no speaking lines and the focus is on O’Bannon’s version of an American cowboy. Thus, Chon’s relocation must be considered but the ethnicity of his partner must be considered as well when evaluating his influence on him. Carmen Fought states in her article Are White People Ethnic? Whiteness, Dominance and Ethnicity that whiteness is viewed as a kind of standard or default configuration, and in debating the status of whiteness as an ethnicity outlines “three basic perspectives on language and whiteness:
1) Anything standard is associated with white speakers; for example, speaking standard varieties of English (which may be hard to define, but play an important ideological role).
2) A level of standardness that is somehow beyond the “basic” level is associated with white speakers, e.g., superstandard grammatical forms or highly specialized vocabulary.
3) Stereotyped (often stigmatized) varieties associated with a particular geographic region are seen as “white” e.g., Valley Girl dialects, New York City dialects” (Fought).
In questioning whether or not white people are even “ethnic”, many questions arise. In Shanghai Noon, Chon faces much discrimination for both being Asian/Chinese and for being ethnic at all, even being labeled “Jewish” by some townspeople in Nevada. Roy O’Bannon and nearly every other American character with speaking lines in English need not worry about the concept of “ethnicity” as their society is dominated by people who are White just like them.
The sentence “This is the West, not the East!” plays a major role in the development of the plot and characters. At first it is a phrase used by Roy O’Bannon in an attempt to rebuke Chon and get him to leave his Chinese roots behind as he is bound by Imperial Decree and other Chinese codes of honor which Roy insists are holding him back from achieving his goals and do not apply in the West (or America). By the end of the film, Chon has internalized this phrase himself, releasing his ties to Imperial China and turning against his fellow Imperial Guards in his new American identity. When he utters the phrase for the first time rather than having it spoken at him by Roy, his transition into becoming an American is complete; he not only recognizes the need to reject his heritage and culture in order to survive in America and accomplish his goals, he wholeheartedly embraces American values placed on him by the dominant society surrounding him.
In examining the language used in the movie it is necessary to consider Jackie Chan as an actor. He speaks in the dialect of Hong Kong English, for which I have attached a consonant inventory. The difference between the actor’s dialect and that of the American actors and characters in the movie is instrumental to understanding the linguistic differences that arise in the movie. After all, the difference in Chon’s dialect of English and that of the White Americans surrounding him is most salient phonetically; when Chon speaks it is instantly known that he is not a native speaker. While his character in the film is not from Hong Kong, the real actor’s background necessarily plays a role in the form of “yellow” English that he speaks.
There are thus several main dialects that play into the sociolinguistic influences on the film and its characters. The dialect used by the White American characters can in this situation be considered “standard”, at least in the context of the film, as their dialogue is dominant in the film’s setting. Chon and Pei-Pei use forms of Asian American English, drawing influences from Hong Kong English, and manifesting in what is seen as “yellow” English by the White American characters. This both entertains them (such that they condescend to Chon and Pei-Pei) and inspires discrimination towards them.
Chon’s transformation from a Chinese Imperial Guard into a Chinese American cowboy in the American West is marked linguistically through his increased use of American idioms, but also by his behavior, indicated by more apparent factors such as his use of horses and guns and his change in attire from Chinese Imperial Guard clothing to stereotypical cowboy clothing. The wacky situation around which the film is based is an exaggeration of how Asian immigrants are treated in the United States, placed in the context of a Western film. Assimilation into a new culture is a difficult and necessary task for all immigrants. While Shanghai Noon is primarily an action-comedy film that tends to view such issues in a light that may appear to be somewhat trivializing, a cultural westward journey is at the crux of the film and its purpose. This sets it apart from both other Hong Kong action movies, and other Westerns, and by synthesizing the two genres creates a narrative, whether intentional or unintentional, that is applicable to Chinese and Asian immigrants who are tasked with the burden of assimilation into American culture.
Works Cited
Shanghai Noon. Dir. Tom Dey. Perf. Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. 2002.
Fought, Carmen. Mesthrie, Rajend. Language and Ethnicity. ed. Fought and Mesthrie. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Setter, Jane. Wong, Cathy S.P. Chan, Brian H.S. Hong Kong English. ed. Setter. Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Ferguson, Charles. Heath, Shirley. Huebner, Thom. Uyechi, Linda. Language in the USA: themes for the twenty-first century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U Press, 2013. Print. Chapter 13: Asian American Voices: language in the Asian American community
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This was the first paper I wrote for the class, which I also got a D on. Granted, my arguments might not be the most sound, but the reason I got a D was for being “political”, which was difficult for me to avoid given the nature of the assignment. Without putting the professor on blast for something that happened many years ago and for which they later apologized (albeit to my advisor and not to the students who were harmed), my experience in their class taught me a lot about how to navigate spaces controlled by cultural dominators. I began to adapt my strategy for getting through the class towards funny movies with Owen Wilson in it. Though my play was ultimately unsuccessful, I enjoyed writing both these papers a lot. It is a fun process for me looking at my old academic writings and taking them as they are.
Iraq in America’s English (2017)
Since the turn of the millennium, the word “Iraq” has been spoken more and more by residents of the United States of America. Its sudden wide proliferation is largely attributable to the USA’s conflict with and declaration of war against Iraq, represented to the public by the forty-third President of the United States George W. Bush, who in his constant televised appearances and public addresses would go on to make certain pronunciations of words in his memorable Texan dialect infamous such as “nukjuləɹ” (nuclear), and of course, “ɪɹæk”. In this paper I shall attempt to draw a connection between the phonetic form of “Iraq” and oppressive power structures that exist in the USA using data collected by our class group of sociolinguistic researchers in Southeast Portland, Oregon.
President Bush and his administration sought in their many public condemnations of Iraq and repeated confident assertions of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East to unite the American people in a full fledged, nationalism-fueled assault against the people, culture, and ideas of Iraq as a means to justify and promote the USA’s military action. In doing so, they made a word that was previously just an expression referring to a distant land overseas that bore little relevance to most American people into an expression that was constantly at the forefront of America’s mindset. “Iraq” came to represent an entity that was, though still far away, a physical embodiment of terror and threat to the very existence of America and its people. Everybody began talking about Iraq, but their manner of doing so varied. The difficulties that arose from pronouncing the word alone made the concept to which it was attached scarier and more foreign, and pushed it further away from receiving true understanding from English speaking Americans, especially those that speak English exclusively. The fear of “the other” is particularly strong in white male Americans, the gendered racial demographic that is undeniably the most absorbed in racism, sexism, xenophobia, and a multitude of other deep-seated forms of hatred of those different from oneself that tie directly into White American Nationalism. Lack of knowledge of another language causes a fear of foreign languages, and corresponding with the militarized American invasion of Iraq, many exclusively English-speaking Americans perceive that the word “Iraq” has in its own right “invaded” the American language, instilling fear simply in being difficult to pronounce.
Our group of researchers sought to elicit a reading of the word “Iraq” (based on the written representation of the word embedded among three test sentences) from randomly selected respondents while simultaneously recording some basic info on their backgrounds, including what languages they spoke. The United States Census Bureau stated in 2011 that of the approximately 290 million residents over the age of five living in the country, approximately 230 million, or nearly 80 percent, spoke only English in their household. During our research, we asked respondents if they spoke other languages, but did not inquire about what languages they spoke in their household. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that most of those 230 million or so Americans did not speak other languages. Of our combined 249 respondents, 99 claimed that they did not speak any language other than English, less than half. Since our sample group was largely students of Reed College, a quite liberal institution, it makes sense that our sample group would have more linguistic diversity than the USA as a whole. 81 of those 99 respondents were white, and 36 of those 81 respondents identified as male, thus giving us 36 white male respondents who did not speak another language besides English. This group of respondents in particular, who made up about a sixth of our data, are, as mentioned above, the most likely to fall into patterns of nationalism-fueled hatred.
The standard English spelling of “Iraq” produces a form that is largely inaccessible to most English speakers for a variety of reasons. For one, there are no commonly used words in the English lexicon (that are not loanwords borrowed from another language) that end with a “q” and there are hardly any that even feature one that is not immediately followed by a “u”. The pronunciation of the “i” that begins the word is also difficult for most English speakers to determine based on the visual representation of the word; both “aɪ” and “ɪ” are produced commonly by speakers attempting to say the word. Perhaps the most contentious letter in “Iraq”, and the one with which our study was concerned is the “a”, which is virtually always pronounced with one of two vowels, “æ” or “ɑ”. Of our sample group of 36 white male respondents who spoke only English, 26, or about 72.3% used the “æ” vowel and 10 of them, or about 27.7%, used the “ɑ” vowel. Of the ten white male exclusively English speaking respondents who used the “ɑ” vowel, only one identified as anything more conservative than “moderately liberal” (assuming that on our political affiliation scale of 1-5, 1 meant extremely liberal, 2 meant moderately liberal, 3 meant moderate, 4 meant moderately conservative, 5 meant extremely conservative); he identified as “moderately conservative” (4). Considering our 81 white respondents who did not speak any other language than English (including female and nonbinary people), 52 used “æ” and 29 used “ɑ”, leading to a 64.2%/35.8% split. Widening our scope and considering all our 249 respondents, 120 of them used the “æ” vowel and 129 of them used the “ɑ” vowel, a 51.8%/48.2% split. A pattern is already clearly visible.
Narrowing our scope even more, of our seven white male respondents who only spoke English and identified as anything more conservative than “2”, only one used the “ɑ” vowel, leading to a 85.7%/14.3% split. Our data with these specific parameters was not very large; considering the one respondent who used the ɑ vowel an outlier is not unreasonable, as one respondent is not necessarily statistically significant. This one respondent was also one of our few respondents who claimed that he had served in the military recently. The actual correct pronunciation of “Iraq” uses the ɑ vowel, and this respondent could have picked it up while actually serving in Iraq from a local or otherwise. Since we do not know anything else other than the fact that he has served in the military recently, it is impossible to know how he came to use the correct pronunciation despite nearly everyone in his demographic using the incorrect “æ”. Whether or not we consider him an outlier, our data still shows a reliable, statistically significant trend. In Hall-Lew, Coppock, and Starr’s paper, the authors determine through an examination of the variation of the pronunciation of the “a” in “Iraq” in representatives in the United States Congress, that a vast majority of conservatives would use the æ vowel. When we examine our own data we see that not only is this true, but whiteness, maleness, and inability to speak languages other than English play a role in using the incorrect vowel as well as conservatism does. It is no coincidence that all four of these factors lead to the instillment of xenophobia and desire to reinforce societal power structures in America that benefit white men with the justification of nationalism.
Let us focus on our respondents who do not fall within this group for contrast. Even if we take only gender into account, excluding all male-identified people and considering only female or non-binary identified persons, we see a 77/79 æ/ɑ split, 49.4%/50.6% in favor of ɑ. Narrowing our scope even further and removing white non-male persons, we get a 35/52 æ/ɑ split, a 40.2%/59.8% split in favor of ɑ. Furthermore, only 11 out of 41 non-white non-male respondents who claim to speak another language besides English use æ, and 30 use ɑ making for a 26.8%/73.2% split in favor of ɑ. This 11/30 split is almost the exact same figure as our 10/26 split in our white male non-English speaking demographic, but reversed.
The evidence is clear that the further away we move from whiteness, maleness, conservatism, and lack of knowledge of foreign languages, the less our data tends towards a misrepresentation of the “a” in “Iraq”; each of these characteristics has been shown to play a part in this. This is not just a dialectal issue; despite being merely the name of a country the word “Iraq” carries an extremely politically and nationalistically charged meaning for American people. In their consistent misrepresentation of the country’s name, Americans are not only pronouncing a word wrong, they are perpetuating power structures that promote hatred of those who are different from them. White male conservative Americans who do not speak any language other than English are part of a group that has always been the most threatening force to America since the moment European explorers touched the soil of what we now know as America; that group is closed-minded white men with no room for any perspective but their own. Their constant colonization and genocide of those belonging to different demographics than themselves and their carelessness in directing how today’s America operates may be the end of human life on Earth as we know it.
Works Cited
Ryan, Camille. "Language Use In The United States: 2011." Census.gov. United States Census Bureau, Aug. 2013. Web.
Hall-Lew, Lauren. Coppock, Elizabeth. Starr, Rebecca L. “Indexing Political Persuasion: Variation in the Iraq Vowels.” American Speech, 2010. Web.