Is “My Mom is a FOB” Hilarious, Culturally Insensitive, or Both?

By Ernie | Thursday, December 4, 2008 | View Comments

FOB, of course, being short for “fresh off the boat.”

Joz: What do you think? http://mymomisafob.com
Ernie: AWESOME.
Joz: The thing I don’t like about it is lack of context.
Joz: It makes it sound like they are mocking their moms (and that’s it)
Joz: You know what I mean?
Ernie: well, they ARE mocking their moms. but there’s an undertone of them just meaning well too
Ernie: hell, half of my personal blog is me mocking my mom
Joz: I still think they are all making fun of their parents and often in a not-so nice way
Joz: Basically what MMIAF does is distills down what our parents do into a tiny post and puts it up on site that is SOLELY about mocking them. Maybe that’s what I rubs me the wrong way.
Joz: Individually those posts wouldn’t bother me if they were on the context of people’s blogs, but distilling them down “to the funny” and compiling them seems different to me.

Joz brings up a good point, but I’m still going to agree to disagree with her. Here’s why – this site is unique, sure, but it comes in the same spirit in other blogs such as Stuff White People Like. And what makes SWPL popular is the fact that it’s a giant in-joke. Asian American kids submit stuff to MMIAF. Hell, I submitted something to MMIAF. People aren’t submitting conversations with their mothers because of spite, but because there’s a moment of humor to be found trying to navigate two conflicting cultures — it’s hilarious that your Taiwanese mom mistakes Tijuana for Marijuana, but it’s endearing too, because she’s trying. Sure, some white asshole can stumble to this and make a sweeping generalizations about Asian people in the comments section, but the site wasn’t made for them. Obviously, it’s made an impact; their website gets tens of thousands of hits a day, and a book deal is in the works.

But enough about me: is My Mom is a FOB well intentioned hilarity or insensitive and inappropriate? Discuss.

What next?

View Comments to “Is “My Mom is a FOB” Hilarious, Culturally Insensitive, or Both?”

Kat wrote:

Actually, I think this is much more like Postcards From Yo Momma (http://www.postcardsfromyomomma.com/) than SWPL. As much as it pokes fun at fob parents, it relies just as much on the humor in the generation-gap and the bizarreness of parental behavior when put down in writing.

Anyway, no amount of context is going to make it funny for a reader who isn’t already in the same…boat.

Posted on 04-Dec-08 at 5:40 pm | Permalink
Roberta wrote:

I am not sure if it’s politically correct, but I like both the Mom website and the Dad website, because the parents described sound like people I would enjoy hanging out with.

Posted on 04-Dec-08 at 6:21 pm | Permalink
yoko wrote:

I found the site hilarious, and I can totally relate to it. It doesn’t strike me as mean at all– it seems to be well-intentioned to me. There’s something kind of loving about it, I think– like “isn’t my mom/dad cute for saying this?”

I have plenty of material I could submit to this site, too….

Posted on 04-Dec-08 at 6:47 pm | Permalink
hannah wrote:

i loved it when it first started out…

nowadays, the content seems so forced, and for a lack of better words… “made up”

Posted on 05-Dec-08 at 4:31 am | Permalink
Tristan wrote:

Hmm. Kinda like this website.

http://sleepingchinese.com/

Posted on 05-Dec-08 at 5:39 pm | Permalink
stan wrote:

I found the site hilarious, especially the fact that e-mails are being posted…. I definitely can relate. I think that if it was renamed “The Things Asian Mothers Say”, I would consider it less insulting.

But in thinking about it, while it does make fun of Asian mothers, the site actually made me think and appreciate my mother more, and it makes me feel great that there is a whole community of people who experience the same funny collides of language and society.

Posted on 08-Dec-08 at 7:06 pm | Permalink
Teresa Wu wrote:

Wanted to weigh in really quick.

@Kat: I was first inspired by Postcards from Yo Momma, actually, though we gravitate toward more than just email. Everyday conversations, photos and videos — we love it all!

@Yoko: Please send your material!

@Hannah: Sorry to hear. Let me know if you’d like to see more/less of something. I do tend to pick out more of the *funny* emails now whereas we started out kind of posting everything across the board. But I love the super sweet ones too.

@Stan: We really thought about renaming it — especially because hey, our names are on it and associated with the content too. We’re proud of the site and the community we’ve built. However, even moving the site from Tumblr to WordPress was a major hurdle and we did lose some readership in the shuffle, and a part of its appeal is the ‘brand’ and catchy title itself. thethingsasianmotherssay.com doesn’t have quite the same effect…

We get our share of criticism and we’ve had to field a lot of questions about whether or not we’re fueling racism. But in the end, it’s well-intentioned, and it’s a shame if people can’t see that because, as Stan said, it really does make me appreciate my Asian mother more. Oh, and don’t miss http://mydadisafob.com!

Posted on 10-Dec-08 at 3:02 pm | Permalink
Catherine wrote:

I was very glad to see this post because I’ve been thinking about the same things. When I first heard about mymomisafob, I was a bit wary of it, but once I started reading the Web site, I started feeling the cockles of my crackly little black heart warming up.

A lot of the anecdotes reminded me of the interactions I have with my mother — her protectiveness of me as I venture into a cultural environment that my parents still find somewhat foreign (despite having been in the US for close to 30 years now), the communication/culture gaps that result between 1st and 2nd generation Asian-Americans (and, indeed, 1st/2nd gen. Americans from anywhere from anywhere) and the warmth, love and humor in a lot of the postings. I think in popular US culture there is this perception of Asian parents as being this homogeneous blob of humorless slave drivers who try to trounce any ounce of individuality out of their children as they drive them into Ivy League schools and into high-paying careers. I like mymomisafob partly because I think it dispels that notion. The best posts emphasize the humanity (and just plain coolness) of our parents.

This brings me to a conversation I had with my fiance. I told him I loved the site and had been sending links to some of my 2nd gen. Asian American buddies, but I still felt a bit unsettled by it and couldn’t put my finger on why. He said ‘that’s because you can relate to it and laugh with it, but I bet if you saw a group of random white people laughing at it, you wouldn’t be happy.”

He hit the nail right on the head. Mymomisafob operates as an awesome “in-joke” (like you guys said) for Asian Americans. In addition, I hope that it also helps to dispel any stereotypical notions of what a “typical” Asian American household is. On the other hand, there will be people who stumble upon the Web site and use it to back up their racist ideas or laugh at it mockingly, not lovingly. My fiance told me about an article he’d read about Chris Rock. Rock had an act he used to do that basically went “Who’s more racist? Black people or white people? Black people!” before elaborating on that. According to this article, he stopped doing that act after he realized that the white people in his audience were laughing really hard at that it and he couldn’t be sure *why* they were laughing (hopefully I got that right… I need to dig up that article but that’s my fiance remembers). So, to be safe, he stopped using that material in his performances.

To put this issue in another context, my fiance is white and was born and raised in Texas. His family covers a wide range of demographic backgrounds, from blue collar working class to upper middle class. He has an uncle who just LOVES those “you know you’re a redneck when…” lists because he can relate to some of the things on them, and my fiance gets a kick out of seeing how much fun his uncle gets out of reading them. But my fiance also said he wouldn’t feel the same way if he saw an investment banker or privileged kid from a rich family reading it and laughing.

So to sum up my comment: I find mymomisafob extremely endearing, but it is on the Internet, and we can’t always control what people will do with what we put on the Internet — and, as we all know, there are a LOT of racist people out there. Having said that, I get the sense that site creators are both smart and very aware of these issues. I hope that the site keeps running and that the anecdotes they chose to post continue to illustrate the complex nature of 1st/2nd gen. Asian-American parent-child relationships while at the same time making us chuckle.

Posted on 10-Dec-08 at 9:10 pm | Permalink
jozjozjoz wrote:

I congratulate Teresa on such great success with MMIAF.

I just wanted to clarify that I while I dislike the lack of context of MMIAF, I don’t have a problem with the site, per se.

Some people may say that MMIAF/MDIAF is really an homage to the things our parents do. I actually don’t disagree with that!

For me, I try really hard not to tell “too many stories” like this on my own blog because I don’t want people to have a caricaturized impression of my Mom or Dad. Back in the day, I used to get tons of requests to “write more Mom & Dad stories,” so many requests that I really thought about the issue a lot. I decided that if I was going to tell stories about my parents, it wasn’t ONLY going to be about the times they did “funny” things. I didn’t want to give off the impression that I only mentioned my parents when I was “mocking them” (even if it was in a loving way).

I’m not saying the folks who run/submit to MMIAF are ACTUALLY mocking their parents; I’m just saying that other people might think that. Of course, maybe other people don’t have a problem with it if the stories are anonymized like the way it is on the site.

But speaking as someone who didn’t want to accidentally portray my parents in the “wrong light” in my own blog, I felt that the key thing that I needed to be aware of when I was writing my stories was context.

Posted on 11-Dec-08 at 7:51 pm | Permalink
Jake of 8bitjoystick.com wrote:

As a White guy I forking love Stuff White People Like.com

Posted on 11-Jan-09 at 3:38 pm | Permalink
Christine wrote:

I don’t think it’s inappropriate. It’s just making fun of the mothers that we love dearly. I might just add something later.

Posted on 05-Feb-09 at 6:16 pm | Permalink
robert559 wrote:

Thanks for assuming the only 'asshole' who would visit this site and make sweeping generalities would be white.

Speaking of making sweeping generalities…. *cough*

Posted on 24-Dec-09 at 4:39 am | Permalink
woot22 wrote:

Well, I found this cute and funny.

http://mymomisafob.com/2009/11/02/shameless-pub...

I think I'll pass on the rest.

Posted on 24-Dec-09 at 2:09 pm | Permalink

8 Asians