He owns the Oriental Riff, as well as Ancient Chinese Secret, ching-chong in sing-song, slant-eyed inscrutability, shortness, small dicks, and much of the rest of the all-you-can-eat buffet of Chinese stereotypes and insults. You might know the riff as the opening to the pop tunes “ Turning Japanese,” “ China Girl,” and “ Kung Fu Fighting.” For the Asian-American, Oriental Riff is such an inescapable soundtrack that, like African-Americans and the n-word, the only way to fight it is to embrace it and make it your own.Īnd Davies does. An epigraph to Peter Ho Davies’ second novel, The Fortunes, is a bar of music entitled “Oriental Riff.” I don’t read music, but I immediately heard it in my head, that tinkle of cascading notes that has alerted audiences to Asian-ness in popular American culture for almost a century.
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