The Naturalized Redneck
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And, more specifically, to Jimmy Wang Yang, a character who first
appeared on Friday Night Smackdown in September of 2006. Jimmy Wang
Yang’s first appearances were not in the ring, beginning instead with a series of
short promo clips that introduced the wrestler to fans. Jimmy—who at first was
called Jimmy Wayne Yang, before settling into a more fully-Korean name—
serves as what the WWE probably considers a race-bending figure: a KoreanAmerican man who speaks with a southern nasal drawl and proclaims himself to
be fully redneck. In his first introductory clip, when he announced himself to the
world, he engages his ethnicity, but suggests that he isn’t what he seems:
Howdy. I know what you’re all thinkin’. Now I reckon you’re
all a little confused out there. But I’m not what you think I am.
[He pauses to put on his black cowboy hat] I ain’t no
foreigner. I ain’t your stereotype. I ain’t no Kung Fu fighter.
And to me, chopsticks are just a piece of wood. Mattera fact,
there ain’t no yeller about me. But there’s one color about me.
A little red. That’s right. I’m a redneck. My name’s Jimmy
Wang Yang. And I’m your boy. Giddyup. Yee haw (WWE
website).
The message is unmistakable, substituting one stereotype for another, but clearly
aligning the wrestler with the Redneck Ideal instead of the foreign suspect. He
marks himself visually as part of the culture, dressed in the videos in jeans, with
the hat, standing in front of a pickup truck. He wears a black leather vest
emblazoned on the back with the confederate battle flag. In the ring, he wrestles
in a white tank top and blue jean-like trousers and wears a Fu Manchu mustache
that presents an odd duality. Historically, such facial hair marks the ethnicity of
the Far East, calling to mind stereotyped images of the Mongol warriors or
Chinese Kung-Fu masters that Yang denies as his heritage in the video. Yet, at
the same time, the Fu Manchu has more recently been adopted as a fairly typical
marker of the good old boy. On Jimmy Wang Yang, the mustache could lend
either way, reinforcing his Korean ancestry or helping to mark him as the
redneck he claims to be. It is through scripting, however, that his appearance
becomes unambiguous. He is a Redneck, as he proclaims, because he adheres to
the expected, stereotypical parameters of the redneck. More, he substitutes—or,
in the case of the Fu Manchu, transforms—the stereotypes of the Asian with the
stereotypes of the white Southern good old boy, and in so doing eases anxieties
that might appear because of his position as a minority within wrestling. In
another video, he wonders why Asians are always thought to be good at math,
why they are thought to set the curve. “Only curves I know is from my old
lady,” he says, etching a silhouette in the air with his hands. In twenty seconds,
he abdicates his role as stereotypically intelligent Asian, substituting instead a
persona of the stereotypically chauvinist redneck, thereby enacting the properly
anti-intellectual strain of the Redneck Ideal and proving that he is not claiming
citizenship as anything other than American.