Who's Hu?

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?”

said Texas State Representative Betty Brown yesterday. She was speaking to, or rather at Ramey Ko who had been invited to the Texas House Elections Committee hearing to talk about perceived voting problems involving people with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean surnames.

“Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

said the lady from Texas, forgetting for the moment that Americans of foreign descent might take umbrage at the insinuation that they are not themselves Americans by virtue of their names. Actually Chinese isn't all that hard and it's the world's most popular language, nor do you have to be able to read the Analects of Confucius to say "Hu," you just make an O with your lips and blow.

The idea that Lee or Park or Honda might just be too much for Texans to handle just might be worth a Texas sized guffaw and thigh slap, even to those who don't drive a Hyundai or Honda or Toyota or Subaru, will probably occur to her any time now -- surely before the Scubasziewskis and Popadopoulis' and Krishnamurthy's of Texas stop snickering in their Stetsons and Lucchese boots.

Is there really a problem in Texas, or are the Republicans trying to suppress votes with a voter ID bill as the Democrats tend to think? Perhaps Lee XiaoPing's drivers license says Sam Lee because he's trying to be accommodating in the first place, but if that's a real problem at the polls all that would be needed is to require the legal name to appear on the license. Of course we're getting the traditional "what Brown really meant to say was. . ." follow up, but it still sounds like the same old WASP supremacy ethnic purity shinola to me. It sounds like:

"all you furriners better be on your best behaviour even if you've been here seven generations. Yer still furriners."

Wouldn't it be funny if Ms. Brown came from one of those families of Brauns, Schmidts and Müllers who became Browns, Smiths and Millers during the First World War? I'm just sayin'.