VL-IV: Chap8- DL and the Sensei

[kelber at mindspring.com]

[This is my last host-post.  Cutting it short because I'll have only sporadic access to e-mail for the rest of the week, starting tomorrow].

DL, tough rebellious teen, is picked up by a lecherous sensei with ties to the Yakuza.  The story reads like a cheesy direct-to-video martial arts flick.

This might have started with Kung Fu,The Karate Kid, etc.and continues to the present day:

http://www.firstshowing.net/2009/01/19/must-watch-official-trailer-for-prachya-pinkaews-chocolate/ (although this isn't in the strict genre of "westerner
is taught the way" type of movie.

These stories are the new-age heirs to a genre of "yellow peril" pulp that TRP's lampooned before.  In Mason & Dixon, there's a segment where the characters are reading aloud from a pulp novel [don't have the book handy]where a woman is abducted first by Jesuits, then by a Chinese man, and in ATD, Dally takes part in a live-action enactment, playing a helpless damsel who's being abducted into the "white" slave trade by fiendish Chinese thugs.  

The "yellow peril," more specifically, the horrifying idea of Asian men abducting and raping white women, was part of the propaganda used to limit Chinese immigration to the States around the turn of the last century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:YellowTerror.jpg

This anxiety has pretty much disappeared from the national psyche [There's an occasional cautionary tale of a western woman ending up in a Thai brothel.  In general, racist-sexual anxiety's been replaced with economic anxieties over the imbalance of trade].  DL's story is midway between the old "yellow peril" pulp and the new martial arts pulp.  TRP combines the two by having a lascivious sensei.

Laura