Angry Asian Man blogs:
Kimchi Mamas first blogged about this a couple of weeks ago… What kind of messed up nonsense is this? This Mother Goose and Grimm comic strip is a couple of weeks old, but dude, what the hell? Come on! Really? They really had to go there with the idiotic Korean dog-eating joke?
I also think a lot of people genuinely think that a woman can not be strong enough to be president…
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking…
Alas USA is not a multiparty system so each party only has to seem more desirable than the other one.…
Ah but the Russia that conservatives hated presented* itself as a progressive force for worker's empowerment and anti-imperialism. Putin's Russia…
A relevant quote from law professor Amanda Frost: Attitudes towards nationwide injunctions also turn on one’s view of the courts…
I have no comment on the cartoon, but I do want to nominate “Kimchi Mamas” for the Most-Awesome-Blogname-Of-The-Year award.
I hope they have a softball team or something.
there is no obvious place to write to the cartoonist, on his website. if anyone finds an email/direct address, please do share.
From kimchi mamas:
OKAY KIMCHI MAMAS…
A protest unspoken is never heard. There is a contact for feedback on the Mother Goose & Grimm comic site. I don’t know if mike peters actually sees the comments, but it’s worth a try. There is power in numbers; speak from a position of power!
Send email to: ben@grimmy.com
Subject: Grimmy Feedback
(Contact GRIMMYSITTER: BENJAMIN | ©1995-2007 Grimmy, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | Dist. by KING FEATURES SYNDICATE, INC)
Posted by: b.q. | Monday, August 18, 2008 at 07:14 PM
Y’know, I’ve heard ‘jokes’ like this quite a bit…about China rather than Korea, actually, I didn’t know the meme existed in relation to Korea…and I always wanted to ask if the people telling it had ever been to China…now, I guess I should say “Asia.” My dad has, on business, plenty of times. He has been served plenty of things Americans would think are weird by Chinese businesspeople and Communist Party officials, people who wanted his company’s business: donkey, turtle, chicken feet, the list goes on. But dog? Never. People in China keep dogs as pets, just like we do. And while yes, three years ago I did hear about some official ordering dogs to be preemptively killed due to a rabies outbreak (and I found this sad and cruel as hell), that was ostensibly to keep people safe. The whole “Asians eat dogs” thing seems more and more to be one of those Oh My Gawd Those Non-White Foreigners Are So Barbaric stories.
I know three people who have eaten/been offered dog meat in Korea and China, but maybe the Chinese and Korean people were just joking then, if it doesn’t happen. Like, maybe they are playing a joke on the Westerners?
I’m very curious to know if they do really eat dogs given that people have told me they’ve eaten it, but then blogs like this say it isn’t true. Given that I know the people I know, and don’t know the random peoples on the internet, logically I am required to believe that dog meat really is available for human consumption. Personally I don’t care whether people eat dogs, cats, cows, pigs, chickens, horses, whatever, so I’m not sure why everyone gets so upset about dogs.
Lots of people eat dogs. The practice has probably diminished with exposure to dog-not-eating cultures. It’s not controversial, or problematic to anyone with an unromantic view of human nature. Meat is meat, and dogs are good value as meat animals.
I actually feel the same way about cannibalism, Robert. Except for the ‘killing the person in the first place’ part, I’m not sure what makes eating human meat so bad, seriously.
—Myca
Dogs are eaten as food by some people in China and Korea (and Switzerland and Spain), but that doesn’t make racist dog eating jokes any more okay than racist watermelon eating jokes. The racist content in that cartoon does not derive from the falsehood of the idea that some Koreans eat dog meat.
When I was in China, I didn’t encounter dog as meal directly, though I did see it on a couple of tourist-oriented menus along with other “Americans don’t eat this” category items. It was definitely verified to be a not-abnormal foodstuff by people I knew. The way it was explained to me by Chinese people I knew was as such — some dogs are good pets, others are good livestock. Much as we keep some mice as pets and feed others to snakes, or keep certain breeds of pigs as pets but think nothing of eating pork (“we” being Americans in general, as in my case I’m a mostlyvegetarian) or, heck, the same is true of birds and fish.
Usual disclaimers of “the few members of x culture I talked to in depth may not be representative”, etc, apply.
The comic strip is just shockingly stupid. Lumping all of Korea into North Korea is the worst part, IMO. South Korea is quite a successful country these days; they make most of our cell phones, and a lot of Chinese fashion and product trends originate there before arriving at your US Wal-Mart.
Myca,
I really like there being a cultural rule that I’m not, and never will be, considered ‘food’.
Agree with you 100% Charles. While I don’t think the people in this thread who have traded anecdotes on how eating dog isn’t all that barbaric would disagree with us or were lining up behind this cartoon in any way, it still bears repeating. Calling a Jew a Christ-killer isn’t the same as calling an Inuit a Zoroaster-killer, just as accusing a Muslim-American of being unAmerican isn’t the same as accusing an Anglican in Ohio of being unOhioan, and just as the whole point behind this isn’t refined culinary analysis. They could made it about chicken and give prejudice a good enough historical time to brew, and we’d end up with the same thing.
Also, the Korean person looks a lot like the dog, though given that the Korean person in question is Kim Jong-Il, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Also, the Korean person looks a lot like the dog, though given that the Korean person in question is Kim Jong-Il, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
I’m not inclined to do so myself for one reason: it feels to me like the label “Kim Jong-Il” was stuck on a generic “Korean appearing person” afterwards to make the joke more acceptable. I could be wrong–maybe the author looked at a picture of Kim and thought “hey, he looks just like one of my characters” but the feel of the cartoon (to me anyway) suggests that labeling the character being made fun of as the dictator was a way to make the cartoon, which otherwise would have been dismissed immediately as just racist, look better. Who would object to making fun of dictators after all?
During the coverage of the run-up to the Bejing Olympics it was publicized in the MSM that one action taken by the Chinese authorities was to go around to the restaurants near the venues and have dog taken off the menus. Here’s an example from the BBC. That particular article says “During the 1988 Seoul Olympics, South Korea also banned doggie dishes from menus.” Now, I’m not exactly sure what the bullshit quotient was on that coverage, so was that true/false/not an issue or what?
I ate dog when I lived in South Korea in 1988-89. (It is a meat like venison, if you’re curious, very lean.) The dish I had was barbecued, but there were also three 0r four different kind of soups in which dog meat was used; the one I remember is called “sa cul tang,” which I think means something like “four season soup.” You can get it in Korean restaurants in the States, but the restaurant near me makes it with lamb. I also remember walking through an outdoor market near where I lived and seeing dog parts for sale, and I lived for a time not far from a place where they raised dogs for food–there were at least two classes of dog: one that people kept for pets and one that was raised for food. Dog, it was explained to me, was generally eaten during the summer, and it was also considered an aphrodisiac, something that men ate for “stamina.”
The Summer Olympics were in Seoul in 1988, and I remember there was a similar push to get all dog-related food items off the menus of restaurants there; if I remember correctly, restaurant owners just changed the names of the some of the dishes and made sure that the names were written only in Korean.
The cartoon is horribly racist; there is nothing objectively wrong with eating dog, just like there is nothing wrong with, say, eating bats or any of the other things that people eat around the world that might seem strange or disgusting to us. If you look at things from a global perspective–leaving cannibalism out of it for the moment–Robert is right: meat is meat, and almost every culture eats something that some other culture considers barbaric. I’m sure I don’t need to remind people that our habit of eating cows is abhorrent to an awful lot of people in India.
Okay, so I was wrong, and thanks for informing me of that, y’all…some people do eat dog.
Thinking more carefully now…the ‘dog-eating Asian’ jokes are based in the need of white Americans to assert white American superiority. “Those barbarians would eat our pets.” “Don’t take Fido on your trip to Korea, hurr hurr hurr.” I’ve never heard a joke like this made in conjunction with a hypothetical dog–always pets, and in this case, anthropomorphic cartoon animals. So it’s a way of calling the Other both savage and stupid–like the average Korean couldn’t tell the difference between someone’s pet and a possible meal. That’s like saying that because my boyfriend likes fishing, I shouldn’t let him look at my aquarium; or that you shouldn’t let your goose-hunting friend meet your pet parakeet.
Still racist, whether they eat dogs or not.