Gold panners

For two days, the obscene and racist players "orientation" video shot by Forty-Niners public relations director Kirk Reynolds was a front page story in the San Francisco Chronicle. It's also captured the attention of the Bay Area Chinese community: the Sing Tao Daily (Xingdao ribao, at www.singtaousa.com) ran a front page story yesterday on the video, focusing on the scenes that ostensibly show San Francisco's mayor (played by Reynolds) quizzing a Chinese American in San Francisco's Chinatown (the part is played by a Korean American employee of the Forty-Niners who has opened eleven martial arts schools in California) about a Chinese newspaper report on the football team. Sing Tao Daily published stills of the scene, which show Reynolds speaking with a man with grotesque buckteeth, a baseball cap, and a goofy smile. According to an inset piece entitled "Materials Like This, Training Like This" (Ruci cailiao, ruci xunlian), the Chinese character speaks with a heavy accent and makes a series of inadvertently humorous statements: the whole bit relies on tired racist jokes about Charlie Chan-style English. Comments like "[Forty-Niners quarterback] Tim Rattay doesn't practice with his teammates, so most of the time he plays with himself" and "The Forty-Niners are very patriotic, support the president . . . support the erection of George W. Bush" give some idea of how inane this scene is and why the Chinese community might react angrily to the news. (Please note that all text in the Sing Tao Daily is in Chinese, so my translation is unlikely to represent an accurate record of the video dialogue.)