Reading on mobile? Click here to view Phil Wang's routine.
I'm a little obsessed with how East Asian people are presented in the media. If one pops up on TV or in a film, I wait to see if the representation is offensive or patronising or ignorant – which it too often is. If it isn't, I give everyone a sage nod and we continue with our evening. If it is, however, I log it into a corner of my mind I like to call the "Anger Zone", for future reference.
One pattern that began to emerge in the Anger Zone was that, as far back as I could remember, whenever a Chinese person appeared on a screen, they were either a Mr Miyagi-esque caricature of wisdom and calm or a babbling, embarrassing lunatic screaming in an incomprehensible accent at the maverick cops who just drove through his fruit stand. They are never just normal, recognisable, functional members of society. Why is that so much to ask, Hollywood? Why can't we be boring too?
I decided to act out this dichotomy. The "wise man" character was pretty easy to come up with. I just thought up a nonsensical Confucian-sounding aphorism and said it in a grossly exaggerated version of my dad's voice.
The fruit vendor, however, took a little longer to nail down: in particular, deciding on what fruit to use. In the routine's original form, it was a pineapple, but that never really landed. It was perhaps too busy a fruit, with its prickly yellow body and weird green hat. It was too distracting. So I thought: "What is the classic comedy fruit? … Watermelon. Done." "Water" also sounds funnier in the accent than "pineapple". Plus they look a bit like boobs, don't they? And that's very funny. (See Mrs Brown's Boys.)
The example of a non-speaking Chinese character (she may have been Japanese, but the point stands) in Final Destination 3 was something I instantly remembered when I started writing this bit, it being one of my earliest entries in the Anger Zone. She is the sole Asian character in the movie, and gets killed suddenly and for no good reason, having not said a single word of dialogue. I remember seeing it with a bunch of white friends at the cinema who all laughed at me upon watching my sole representative in this 2006 horror classic get abruptly and unceremoniously rubbed out. My impression in the routine of what the film-makers made her do got sillier and sillier, until it reached the form you see in the video.
Anyway, I hope the clip speaks for itself, and that you like it, and that maybe it will find its way into a special little corner of your mind.
Phil Wang is at the Pleasance Bunker, Edinburgh, until 24 August.
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