As I’ve mentioned before, I am a fan and frequent visitor to Angry Asian Man, a website/blog maintained by Korean American Phil Yu, who posts about news items, current events, and cultural/media examples that relate to Asian Americans and more specifically, to how they affect our image in society. Phil’s site is already pretty popular but he has apparently hit the mainstream, now that he’s being profiled by the Washington Post:

The refrain “That’s racist!” also appears regularly -- sometimes half-jokingly, oftentimes not, when Yu stumbles upon what he views as stereotypical depictions of Asian Americans. But no, he’s not actually that angry. He’s just like a lot of other bloggers in the URL-littered landscape, a man who has something to say that he thinks other people aren’t saying. Latinos have a right to be angry, blacks have a right to be angry -- why can’t Asians be angry, too?

“I wanted to play with this idea of being ‘angry,’ to take on this persona of an Angry Asian Man, because we as Asians are not usually seen as an angry, militant, conscious group,” Yu, a graduate student in the University of Southern California’s cinema and television school, says by phone from his home in west Los Angeles. “That’s the stereotype that’s been attributed to us -- you know, the model minority -- so much so that we start to believe it ourselves.”

Keep up the great work, Phil, and keep being angry!