I wonder if my race radar is tuned too high

I've been watching a fair amount of the summer Olympics over the last two weeks. And NBC, which is the official and seemingly sole network covering the Olympics (well, their affiliates also show coverage--so that includes MSNBC, the Oxygen network, and the USA network) has had their talking heads doing not only stories about athletes (predominantly American but also others, like top ranked gymnasts and swimmers from other nations) but "cultural" pieces.


In particular, The Today Show has been doing these, ranging from the serious (they featured some teenagers from the Earthquake ravaged Szechuan province coming to Beijing to see the Olympics for a week) to the silly (Meredith Viera getting a ping pong lesson from a member of the U.S. team--so it's sort've both "Chinese" and "American").

But occasionally as I watch their hijinks I can't help but cringe and wonder: are they mocking Chinese culture? Making fun of Chinese people? Laughing at the Chinese language?

In this morning's episode, one of their correspondents does this whole report on "chops." A chop, in case you don't know, is a Chinese seal.


[Here's some examples]

I have two--they both are of my Chinese name, and I have used them to stamp my books (along with my name in English). The seals are used on everything--as a way to sign your name, to declare a document official, to be the imprint of a company, organization, group, or individual. They are also an art form--people carefully carve the characters for each person into a soft stone that is then pressed into red ink and onto a document. It's really quite beautiful.

And in the piece, this came through, but what also came through is this sense of how needless the beauracracy of China is with their insistence that a document is only official once it has the seal imprinted on the piece of paper. And then the correspondent made the usual series of bad jokes by punning on the word "chop"--including using the phrase "chop, chop!" which I definitely felt was in bad taste.

Because while perhaps people don't know the origins of this phrase, it was one commonly used to instruct Asian servants, typically Chinese, Japanese, or Filipino house boys to hurry up. As in "Ling Ling, chop, chop! Missy wants her tea now!"

And once again, I wonder if my racial radar is tuned too high. In particular, because they have been in China, because I was raised in a Chinese American family, am I being oversensitive when it comes to all things Chinese?

[I know I've already written on the topic of being over-sensitive and in-sensitive about race--but I return to this because I think it's hard to figure out what the small stuff is and not to sweat it and what the bigger stuff (even if seemingly smaller) means in terms of trying to live the anti-racist praxis.]